I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now. I call it Exhaustive Free Association.
Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it could be!"[1] Once you spot it, you notice it all the damn time.
Since I've most commonly encountered this amongst rat/EA types, I'm going to have to talk about people in our community as examples of this.
Examples
Here's a few examples. These are mostly for illustrative purposes, and my case does not rely on me having found every single example of this error!
Security Mindset
The second level of security mindset is basically just moving past this. It's the main thing here. Ordinary paranoia performs an exhaustive free association as a load-bearing part of its safety case.
Superforecasters and AI Doom
A bunch of superforecasters were asked what their probability of an AI killing everyone was. They listed out the main ways in which an AI could kill everyone (pandemic, nuclear war, chemical weapons) and decided none of those would be particularly likely to work, for everyone. They ended up giving some ridiculously low figure, I think it was less than one percent. Their exhaustiv...
Make this part of your paper trail
Save this paper to a shelf, write a review, and keep your own notes.