As several commenters here have said, the business owner example isn't a great fit for heroic responsibility. The core is taking responsibility for things that aren't your job, that you are not socially expected to be responsible for, because you have decided that the thing needs to be done.

The archetypal fictional example is the hero who raises the rebellion that overthrows the Evil Empire. A normal sensible peasant whose home has just been burned doesn't do that, he just tries to survive the winter. The hero decides to do more than that, even though it's not their job and they're not (at the start of the book/movie/whatever) distinguished from all the other thousands of people in the same position. That choice is why we call them the hero.

Or, for a real-life example, a factory-owner in 1940s Germany might reasonably feel that he has quite enough to do trying to keep his business running in a war zone. It's not his job to save Jewish lives, they're not his relatives or anything. And even trying to save them could be very hazardous. Nevertheless, Oskar Schindler decided he was going save as many lives as he could anyway, and saved about 1,200 people. That's what heroic responsibility looks like.

And, the most obvious example to anyone on LessWrong: there is no social expectation that a normal citizen who is not a senior government official will decide that it's up to him to save the world from the risk that Unfriendly AI kills us all, but Eliezer Yudkowsky saw that no one else was going to do the job, and he wants the world to be saved, so he's spent his career trying.

The heroic responsibility described by OP, the determination to focus on whether [goal] is actually happening or whether people are buck-passing or symbolically pretending to do the thing, or whatever other failure mode -- all that is downstream of the heroic decision to take responsibility for [goal] in the first place.

I agree with others here that appearance is regrettably important in general.

You ask about looking good for a romantic partner. I suggest you should additionally think about screening effects. Remember that, as a generalisation, the typical woman faces a different problem than the typical man when looking for a partner: the woman has to screen through a large number of offers, many/most of which are low-quality, to find a partner she wants. People in general respond to screening problems with shortcuts and heuristics. A person who knows you well will consider your appearance as one aspect of what they know about you; a person who has just met you is likely to make a snap judgement on your appearance. Your aim should be for an appearance good enough that it is not making most potential partners screen you out at the first step.

I can’t think of such a term, and AI’s best effort is ultracrepidarianism, which isn’t quite the same, and which doesn’t roll off the tongue. Unless someone else has a better idea, I suggest ‘misgeneralising’. You’re right that it’s a relatively common bias and needs a name.

Thank you for creating this.

Thanks for the comment, and I agree that it would be helpful if the debate on this topic could focus on the question of 'how do we encourage people to take up a less harmful addiction' -- like vaping vs smoking -- rather than typically jumping to the question of ban / don't ban.

"Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc." 

Yes, Zvi gives evidence on bankruptcy rates. However, that is not the only kind of harm. Sports gambling doesn't have direct health effects the way that drug or alcohol addictions do. Different types of addictions hit relationships, and sports gambling isn't good for relationships, but it's plausibly less harmful than a porn addiction. Sports gambling leaves people functional and able to hold down a job, again in a way that not all other addictions do. I don't think you can assert that banning sports gambling will make people 'much less harmed'. Not unless you've done a deep dive into all the different forms of harm caused by different types of addiction which they might get instead. If someone like Scott Alexander did that kind of analysis and announced that banning sports gambling is still worthwhile because people will addict themselves to cannabis or porn and that is net better, that would be different, but so far as I know, no one has tried to answer the question. 

Separate point: you also can't make the jump from 'sports gambling is harmful' to 'we should ban sports gambling'. Banning things also causes harm. It moderately reduces takeup, but doesn't eliminate the thing banned -- illegal gambling is a problem everywhere people ban it, Prohibition didn't eliminate alcohol, and the War on Drugs didn't magically stop people taking them. So banning things causes a moderate reduction in usage of the thing, with an empirical question mark over how much. Banning things also means criminalising people who would otherwise not be criminalised, ruining their lives. It means devoting more societal resources to police and prisons, to enforce the ban, or else it means diverting existing law enforcement resources away from dealing with other crimes. Even if you accept both that sports gambling is harmful to users (more harmful than whatever other thing they'd get addicted to instead) and that banning it would somewhat reduce usage of gambling, you still can't come to a firm conclusion that banning it is net beneficial to society.

On Zvi's levels of legality, I'm OK with the idea of making sports gambling a 2, ie legal with modest frictions, but I really don't believe that society can justify going to level 3 and criminalising it. And, again, the whole should-we-ban-it debate is a distraction that doesn't help with the broader question of how society can treat people with addictive personality disorder. 

Hard disagree to point 1. The fact that humanity hasn't tried to hide is not counter-evidence to the Dark Forest theory. If the Dark Forest is correct, the prediction is that all non-hiding civilisations will be destroyed. We don't see anyone else out there, not because every civilisation decided to hide, but because only hiders survived.

To be clear: the prediction of the Dark Forest theory is that if humanity keeps being louder and noisier, we will at some point come to the attention of an elder civilisation and be destroyed. I don't know what probability to put on this theory being correct. I doubt it ranks higher than AI in terms of existential risk.

I do know that 'we haven't been destroyed yet, barely 100 years after inventing radio' is only evidence that there are no ultra-hostile civilisations within 50 light-years which also have the capability to detect even the very weakest radio signals from an antique Marconi. It is not evidence that we won't be destroyed in future when signals reach more distant civs and/or we make more noticeable signals.

A parable to elucidate my disagreement with parts of Zvi's conclusion:

Jenny is a teenager in a boarding school. She starts cutting herself using razors. The school principal bans razors. Now all the other kids can't shave and have to grow beards (if male) and have hairy armpits. Jenny switches to self-harming with scissors. The school principal bans scissors. Now every time the students receive a package they have to tear it open with their bare hands, and anyone physically weak or disabled has to go begging for someone to help them. Jenny smashes a mirror into glass shards, and self-harms with those. The principal bans mirrors...

Any sane adult here would be screaming at the principal. "No! Stop banning stuff! Get Jenny some psychological treatment!" 

Yes, I know the parable is not an exact match to sports betting, but it feels like a similar dynamic. There are some people with addictive personality disorder and they will harm themselves by using a product that the majority of the population can enjoy responsibly^[1]. (Per a comment above, 39% of the US population bet online, of whom only a tiny fraction will have a gambling problem.) The product might be gambling, alcohol, online porn, cannabis, or something else. New such products may be invented in future. But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else^[2]. That is what 'addictive personality disorder' means.

Sometimes the authorities want to ban the product in order to protect addicts. But no one ever asks the question: how can we stop them from wanting to self-harm in the first place? Because just banning the current popular method of self-harming is not a solution if people will go on to addict themselves to something else instead^[3]. I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can't gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts. 

I am a libertarian, and I have great sympathy for Maxwell Tabarrok's arguments. But in this case, I think the whole debate is missing a very important question. We should stop worrying about whether [specific product] is net harmful and start asking how we can fix the root cause of the problem by getting effective treatment to people with addictive personality disorder. And yes, inventing effective treatment and rolling it out on a population scale is a much harder problem than just banning [target of latest moral panic]. But it's the problem that society needs to solve. 

1. ^{^}

   In my parable the principal bans 'useful' things, while authorities responding to addictive behaviour usually want to ban entertainment. That isn't a crux for me. Entertainment is intrinsically valuable, and banning it costs utility - potentially large amounts of utility when multiplied across an entire population. 

2. ^{^}

   Or more than one something else. People can be addicted to multiple things, I'm just eliding that for readability.

3. ^{^}

   Zvi quotes research saying that legalizing sports betting resulted in a 28% increase in bankruptcies, which suggests it might be more financially harmful than whatever other addictions people had before, but that's about as much as we can say.

I agree with your first paragraph. I think the second is off-topic in a way that encourages readers, and possibly you yourself, to get mind-killed. Couldn’t you use a less controversial topic as an example? (Very nearly any topic is less controversial.) And did you really need to compound the problem by assigning motivations to other people whom you disagree with? That’s a really good way to start a flame war.

I spent eighteen months working for a quantitative hedge fund. So we were using financial data -- that is accounts, stock prices, things that are inherently numerical. (Not like, say, defining employee satisfaction.) And we got the data from dedicated financial data vendors, the majority from a single large company, who had already spent lots of effort to standardise it and make it usable. We still spent a lot of time on data cleaning.