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Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths · Gwern.net

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Pessimistic forecasters are overconfident in fixating, hedgehog-like, on only one scenario for how they think something must happen; in reality, there are always many ways through the garden of forking paths, and something needs only one path to happen. A clas­sic cog­ni­tive bias⁠ in tech­no­log­i­cal fore­cast­ing is ⁠motivated-stopping⁠ and lack of imag­i­na­tion in con­sid­er­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for a steel­man⁠. Many peo­ple use a men­tal model of tech­nolo­gies in which they pro­ceed in a se­r­ial se­quen­tial fash­ion and as­sume every step is nec­es­sary and only all to­gether are they suf­fi­cient, and note that some par­tic­u­lar step is dif­fi­cult or un­likely to suc­ceed and thus as a whole it will fail & never hap­pen. But in re­al­ity, few steps are truly re­quired. Progress is pre­dictably un­pre­dictable: A tech­nol­ogy only needs to suc­ceed in one way to suc­ceed, and to fail it must fail in all ways. There may be many ways to work around, ap­prox­i­mate, brute for

--- title: "Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths" description: "Pessimistic forecasters are overconfident in fixating, hedgehog-like, on only *one* scenario for how they think something *must* happen; in reality, there are always many ways through the garden of forking paths, and something needs only one path to happen." created: 2014-06-01 modified: 2019-06-09 status: finished confidence: likely importance: 6 css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs ... > A classic cognitive bias in technological forecasting is [motivated-stopping](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L32LHWzy9FzSDazEg/motivat

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