I had to think on this point a while; I’ve seen you mention it elsewhere too.
Yeah, I think maybe you’re right about bad ideas at least propagating more widely than good ideas. I’m not sure if we over-update on them per se, but I do notice that they get signal-boosted much more often. I assume this is because they need to be in order to survive better (better sounding ideas would be more easily taken by definition).
I’m not sure what the mechanism would be to cause people to actually update on them more readily than good news. I have some thoughts, but they are more complicated. Basically, they amount to there being tribal in-groups who need the outgroup to be wrong, and therefore update on negative news, since the outgroup is larger and external (and thus negative news would more likely apply to it).
“Bad thing happened, ingroup right, outgroup wrong, we told them so, etc.”
I had to think on this point a while; I’ve seen you mention it elsewhere too.
Yeah, I think maybe you’re right about bad ideas at least propagating more widely than good ideas. I’m not sure if we over-update on them per se, but I do notice that they get signal-boosted much more often. I assume this is because they need to be in order to survive better (better sounding ideas would be more easily taken by definition).
I’m not sure what the mechanism would be to cause people to actually update on them more readily than good news. I have some thoughts, but they are more complicated. Basically, they amount to there being tribal in-groups who need the outgroup to be wrong, and therefore update on negative news, since the outgroup is larger and external (and thus negative news would more likely apply to it).
“Bad thing happened, ingroup right, outgroup wrong, we told them so, etc.”