Can you make sense of those biographies without going deeper than "lip service" + conformism state?
Dunno, haven't read any of those. But if you're sure that something like that exists, I'd like to hear how is it achievable on human psychology.
I mean, paperclip maximizer is seriously ready to do anything to maximize paperclips. It really takes the paperclips seriously.
On the other hand, there are no humans that seem to care about anything in particular that's going on in the world. People are suffering and dying, misfortune happens, animals go extinct, and relatively few do anything about it. Many claim they're concerned and that they value human life and happiness, but if doing something requires going beyond the safe zone of conformism, people just don't do it. The best way I've figured out to overcome this is to manipulate that safe zone to allow more actions, but it would seem that many people think they know better. I just don't understand what.
I could go on and state that I'm well aware that the world is complicated. It's difficult to estimate where our choices do lead us to, since net of causes and effects is complex and requires a lot of thinking to grasp. Heuristics human brain uses exist pretty much because of that. This means that it's difficult to figure out how to do something beside staying in the safe zone that you know to work at least somehow.
However, I still think there's something missing here. This just doesn't look like a world where people do particularly care about anything at ...
ITT we talk about whatever.