Eight studies reveal a bias in human imagination

Where is the nearest grocery store? "Earth."

How can your phone be worse or better? "It could not work."

There are endless ways, most of them uninteresting, to make something worse. Making something better is interesting.

> Everybody knows about the hedonic treadmill: once you’re moderately happy, it’s hard to get happier. But nobody has ever really explained why this happens. People say things like, “oh, you get used to good things,” but that’s just a description, not an explanation. Why do people get used to good things?

> Now we might have an answer: people get used to good things because they’re always imagining how things could be better. So even if things get better, you might not feel better. When you live in a cramped apartment, you dream of getting a house. When you get a house, you dream of a second house. Or you dream of lower property taxes. Or a hot tub. Or two hot tubs. And so on, forever.

Congress is a clique filled with old inside traders that hoard money like dragons while the phone is a device which enables me to even know about that. That's what's going in my head.

To unpack that statement, think about someone that does nothing with their life. Literally nothing. They'll quickly suffer hunger, starvation and finally a slow death. These are the defaults of life, you cannot sit still. It is not a choice. Even us who feed ourselves, and live a life, will still suffer old age and death. All one can do is take action in their life to reduce their suffering now, and in the future. You can apply this model to all facets of life, from relationships, work, gym, healthy eating, art and so on.

So really the study has just thought about it from the wrong angle. It's not people thinking 'how things could be better', its the brain naturally thinking 'how can I reduce my suffering further'.

I suspect that this is an example. There are a huge number of ways things could be worse, and a far smaller number of ways things could be better. So it may actually be easier to come up with examples from the latter set, since your options are more restricted.

But in that case I'm almost always comparing hypothetical to hypothetical, i.e. bracing myself before trying someone's first homecooked meal. I imagine that I'm about to eat literal dirt, and this makes even lightly-seasoned sludge taste somewhat fancy.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-...

Although the middle managers who have destroyed things like the e.g. the Discovery channel are kind of doing the latter, but they'd argue they're making it better by increasing profits through cheap paranormal ghost shows.

We call it thermodynamics, Murphy’s Law, and other things.

So evolution countered that bias by focusing our attention wherever we might conceivably be able to improve things. Or push others to improve things.

That’s my theory

This is great prompt for ChatGPT. I had fun exploring its internal biases. Examples:

guns -> add safety & tracking features

drug abuse -> decriminalization, safe injection sites

national defense policy -> fewer nukes, more cyber & space defense

interrogation techniques -> more ethics & sensitivity training, more psychological & non-coercive techniques

environmental regulation -> prevention, penalties, accountability, global approach

cryptocurrency -> scale up, security features, regulation, integration

abortion -> increase access, funding, legal protection

racial justice -> more academic, employment & leadership opportunities, intersectionality

It clearly has a bias towards lefty, pro-government, pro-regulation positions. I would assume because its training inputs came more from academia, less from right-wing rants.

I assume strongly that if you phrase the question as “how might your life be worse or better” people will also thing of negative alternatives.

The thing is when you only ask “how might your life be different” people will pull on what they have already thought about and most people have plans and dreams for improvements already in their mind.