This is related to the Streetlight effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect except you do it to

This is related to the Streetlight effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect except you do it to yourself by putting up a streetlight in a place you hope is useful. In general, whenever you look somewhere new, you will find something you didn't expect. Science is just replete with this. In the funniest cases you get elderly scientists confidently declaring that some science is Done and All The Things Have Been Discovered... then someone puts up a new streetlight/metric and it turns out there were more things under heaven and earth than was dreamt of in their philosophy. I haven't found a good word for this in general but I've been internally using the phrase "cognitively available" for this sort of thing. There are well-worn paths through the space of all thoughts we can think, and they are generally co-evolved with the world we live in and structured the way they are for reasons, but they are not always aligned with the details of where we are right now. There's a lot of variants on this theme, such as adding a new metric and freaking out as the article says, bikeshedding where a group would rather argue about something cognitively available and easy to argue about than the hard thing they really ought to be arguing about, the whole System 1 versus System 2 thing (google it if you don't know what that is), all sorts of manifestations of cognitive laziness resulting in a sort of psuedo-force attracting you to the cognitively available easy concepts instead of the correct ones you need to engage with. Interestingly and topically, my experimenting with ChatGPT shows that it has a very similar phenomenon, and others have seen it too. For ChatGPT what is "cognitively available" is discussions that have been done to death on the internet. Ask it something super popular and it will definitely give you the right answer. Ask it a very closely related question but one that is different in some critical detail, and the "attraction" of the common question will overwhelm the model and it'll still give you the answer for what it finds cognitively available. (This suggests that mentally modelling ChatGPT as an extremely well trained System 1, but still ultimately a System 1, may be a productive line of thinking.)