The optimism of the gaps

I've noticed a subtype of optimism bias, common in thinking about AI, where people assume things are going well in whatever areas they're not looking closely at. If you're paying attention to technical alignment, you might think "well, things aren't looking great here, but at least there are people at the labs who are on top of things and won't actually send us off a cliff." If you interact with people at the labs, you might think "well, the labs don't seem to understand the problem and are happily going to send us off a cliff, but there's a good chance the government will step in before things get to that point." If you interact with people in government, or just pay attention to what's going on there, you might think "well, legislators don't understand and aren't paying attention to the issue and Marc Andreessen is an advisor to the president and people in DC are constantly distracted by a million different things, but at least there are people working on the technical side, and they might come up with something."

A better intuition would be that, however poorly things are going in the area you're paying attention to, they are probably going about equally poorly in all other areas. However uninformed and not-on-top of things people are in the domain you're working in, they're probably the same in all other domains.