People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.
People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.
Sure. Many have not. I’m thinking of stuff like ox-drawn and then mechanized ploughs, four- versus three-crop rotation, et cetera. The point is there is pushback regardless of benefit and even after it’s been demonstrated. Plenty of people are fine being comfortable. Which is fine. But it also explains why companies and societies with a nudge feature do better.
> if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway
Again, sure. If it’s their land, it gets acquired. If it’s your land they’re tilling, you get a say.
I’m not saying all-nor even most—pushback is unfounded. Just that there are plenty of cases where it is, and the solution there is to push through the change.
This is just a variant of the argument ”people don’t know what’s good for them”. You’re very close to the actual answer, which is that the aforementioned ”manager class” is simply convinced that they understand reality better than those below them, which is quite frankly absurd considering the fact that managers very rarely do any of the ”real work” that these tools supposedly make redundant, and yet they still believe themselves to understand the potential better.
Like when doctors insisted they didn't need to wash their hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with...)
or "science advances one funeral at a time" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle)