“People protect their egos by not branching out into the unfamiliar, even if it would be better” strongly fails the common sense test. Obviously people do want to live better lives, no?

transhumanist. prev: cofounder & CTO Alongside, eth core dev, protocols ConsenSys, AI Microsoft

However, I think there’s truth to it. One explanation could be that people whose mental training algorithms strongly optimize for not being surprised (in the cross-entropy-loss technical sense, not necessarily vocalizations about being surprised), won’t value changing up their environment.

It would make their models ridden with surprise and so are heavily penalized.

Personal growth potential scales with tolerance of surprise in one’s mental model.