My ideology-of-all-public-officials guess is pretty weak compared to an obvious alternative: simple public-choice herding at the executive level. (200 units instead of a million.)
If governments were each minimising their own reputation loss by (correctly) predicting that they wouldn’t be punished for doing what everyone was doing, this could be enough to prevent ~all innovation. As much as you want safety in numbers, you doubly don’t want to be the first to risk and lose. No entrainment needed, let alone intentional coordination.
(What could explain Israel’s contract being redacted? The dodgy data-sharing agreement? No, that came out. The reputational risk of being seen to have rushed something out in [Autumn 2020]? No: it worked, so why not unredact now?)
I place >60% on the herding belief fwiw, especially if we limit to countries that have enough power to actually shake things (eg China, US, UK, Russia etc).
An additional piece of evidence for this is the degree of correlated beliefs about things like HCTs and genetic enhancement.
One last guess:
My ideology-of-all-public-officials guess is pretty weak compared to an obvious alternative: simple public-choice herding at the executive level. (200 units instead of a million.)
If governments were each minimising their own reputation loss by (correctly) predicting that they wouldn’t be punished for doing what everyone was doing, this could be enough to prevent ~all innovation. As much as you want safety in numbers, you doubly don’t want to be the first to risk and lose. No entrainment needed, let alone intentional coordination.
(What could explain Israel’s contract being redacted? The dodgy data-sharing agreement? No, that came out. The reputational risk of being seen to have rushed something out in [Autumn 2020]? No: it worked, so why not unredact now?)
I place >60% on the herding belief fwiw, especially if we limit to countries that have enough power to actually shake things (eg China, US, UK, Russia etc).
An additional piece of evidence for this is the degree of correlated beliefs about things like HCTs and genetic enhancement.