Reasons To Reject
A common story hero in our society is the great innovator, opposed by villains who unthinkingly reject the hero’s proposed innovation, merely because it requires a change from the past. To avoid looking like such villains, most of us give lip service to innovation, and try not to reject proposals just because they require change.
On the other hand, our world is extremely complex, with lots of opaque moving parts. So most of us actually have little idea why most of those parts are they way they are. Thus we usually don’t know much about the effects of adopting any given proposal to change the status quo, other than that it will probably make things worse. Because of this, we need a substantial reason to endorse any such proposal; our default is rejection.
So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place – we want both to reject most proposals, and to avoid seeming to reject them just because they require change, even though we don’t specifically know why they would be bad ideas. Our usual solution: rationalization.
That is, we are in the habit of collecting reasons why things might be bad ideas. There might be inequality or manipulation, the rich might take control, it might lead to war, the environment might get polluted, mistakes might be made, regulators might be corrupted, etc. With a library of reasons to reject in hand, we can do simple pattern matching to find reasons to reject most anything. We can thus continue to pretend to be big fans of innovation, saying that unfortunately in this case there are serious problems.
I see (at least) two signs that suggest this is happening. The first sign is that my students are usually quick to name reasons why any given proposal is a bad idea, but it takes them lots of training to be able to elaborate in any detail why exactly a reason they name would make a proposal bad. For example, if they can identify anything about the proposal that would involve some people knowing secrets that others do not, they are quick to reject a proposal because of “asymmetric information.” But few are ever able to offer a remotely coherent explanation of the harm of any particular secret.
The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea. This is dramatically different from their eagerness to defend the status quo, when they know it is the status quo. When people don’t know that something actually works now, they assume that it can’t work.
This habit of pattern matching to find easy reasons to reject implies that would-be innovators shouldn’t try that hard to respond to objections. If you compose a solid argument to a particular objection, most people will then just move to one of their many other objections. If you offer solid arguments against 90% of the objections they could raise, they’ll just assume the other 10% holds the reason your proposal is a bad idea. Even having solid responses to all of their objections won’t get you that far, since most folks can’t be bothered to listen to them all, or even notice that you’ve covered them all.
Of course as a would be innovator, you should still listen to objections. But not so much to persuade skeptics, as to test your idea. You should honestly engage objections so that you can refine, or perhaps reject, your proposal. The main reason to listen to those with whom you disagree is: you might be wrong.
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
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The self-serving bias causes people to treat themselves more generously than others, not by entirely different standards. (Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish the self-serving bias from alternative explanations in other cases, such as the fundamental bias of attribution.) Someone who disliked change wouldn't necessarily avoid checking against his cached beliefs--for the self-interested reason that other people won't ignore them. Near-far better explains the discrepancy than does incentives. Sometimes incentives are involved, but they're not just a resistance to change they think they must rationalize. When prediction markets were discussed, the opponents weren't stick-in-the-muds; gwern(0) has a thing about privacy and the other critic works for an admissions office.
Robin has an interesting insight here that people cache automatic arguments they apply when they want to oppose something--anything. What I question is that people are embarrassed to admit that they have a rational prima facie aversion to change or even an irrational aversion based on overweighting loss.