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Lumifer comments on The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias - Less Wrong Discussion
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I would throw in the third possible cause for the pessimism bias, besides the Argument From Crisis and the slanted news coverage. Many organizations (both governmental and private) have incentives to make the population more fearful. Few (and in case of governments, very few if any) organizations want to make the population fearless.
Examples are trivial: the police want the population to be afraid of crime because it gives them more power, guarantees their jobs, raises their status, makes compliance easier and oversight harder, etc. etc.
This principle applies widely and includes the top levels of the government -- a scared population is just more malleable and more convenient to govern.
Does this come close to being a 'group selection' argument?
(A brief explanation just in case that phrase isn't common knowledge: natural selection in biology works on the level of individuals, and individual genes. For ages, a minority of biologists have been trying to show that selection can also work between groups directly even if the adaptation harms the fitness of individual members of the group. So far, they haven't been able to convincingly show that this exists.)
The police, as an organization, cannot 'want' anything, since police departments are not agents capable of wanting. So the question is whether individuals within the department share those incentives to a sufficiently strong degree that they are likely to justify and coordinate around goals like "I will spread a culture of fear throughout my neighborhood." It might be that this is the case, but it's less obvious at the individual level than it is at the level of the organization; I could just as easily see police enlistment as selecting for people who specifically desire to help people be less afraid.
They can as members of an institution because of the nature of people that engage in that kind of work. The tend to be 1s and 8s on the enneagram and they are into what is right, just, and correct. They drive around and they see ways they could solve problems and make people conform to their view of the world. Police want to be able to channel their anger at society and at crime at certain places. They want to have the tools they need to do that. The last thing they want is to do is see a criminal go free because they lacked a certain tool to arrest them or get information to arrest them. Creating fear around crime and the threat of pain and loss is how, institutionally, they can get what they want to do their jobs the way they think it should be done rather than the way that we the people might be able to consent to and approve. In this country, we have created fear around drugs, people of color, and given the police carte blanche.
I am not talking about natural or unnatural selection. I'm talking about incentives.
I don't think this is a useful tack to take. By the same reasoning, organizations cannot 'do' anything as well. Reductionism is not a universal tool to be applied to everything you see.
They don't need to justify and coordinate -- they need just to do it.
You know you can test your seeing against empirical reality, right? :-)
Incentives work on individuals. If the individuals inside an organisation have no incentive but the group as a whole doesn't, nothing gets done.
Funny how all the organizations are arranged in such a way that the organization's incentives are transmitted to the individuals inside them...
Part of Alan Greenspan's apology was that his biggest mistake was to believe that's true. Organisations are structured in a way to incentivise behavior that benefits them but nobody gets a promotion as a police officer because his superiors think he advanced the interest of the police by getting the population to be more afraid.
You are mistaken. It is true that organization's incentives are always transmitted to the individuals within it. What is not true is that those are the only incentives which these individuals have.