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Lex asks if the incident made Altman less trusting. Sam instantly says yes, that he thinks he is an extremely trusting person who does not worry about edge cases, and he dislikes that this has made him think more about bad scenarios. So perhaps this could actually be really good? I do not want someone building AGI who does not worry about edge cases and assumes things will work out and trusting fate. I want someone paranoid about things going horribly wrong and not trusting a damn thing without a good reason.

Eh... I think you and him are worried about different things.

The most salient example of the bias I can think of comes from reading interviews/books about the people who worked in the extermination camps in the holocaust. In my personal opinion, all the evidence points to them being literally normal people, representative of the average police officer or civil service member pre-1931. Holocaust historians nevertheless typically try very hard to outline some way in which Franz Stangl and crew were specially selected for lack of empathy, instead of raising the more obvious hypothesis that the median person is just not that upset by murdering strangers in a mildly indirected way, because the wonderful-humans bias demands a different conclusion.

This goes double in general for the entire public conception of killing as the most evil-feeling thing that humans can do, contrasted with actual memoirs of soldiers and the like who typically state that they were surprised how little they cared compared to the time they lied to their grandmother or whatever.

Rewrote to be more clear.

lc5d302

The "people are altruistic" bias is so pernicious and widespread I've never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for. Most seem to both greatly underestimate the size of this bias, and assume opinions either way are a form of mind-projection fallacy on the part of nice/evil people. In fact, it looks to me like this skew is the deeper origin of a lot of other biases, including the just-world fallacy, and the cause of a lot of default contentment with a lot of our institutions of science, government, etc. You could call it a meta-bias that causes the Hansonian stuff to go largely unnoticed.

I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it's important but my writing skills are lacking.

This is a crazy hit rate. Someone should give sapphire 100MM$ to trade with.

Are you a prosecutor/judge?

Was wondering how a criminal defense attorney could have ever believed that police shouldn't exist until I go to the end!

Do happy people ever do couple's counseling for the same reason that mentally healthy people sometimes do talk therapy?

Ok, then that sounds like a criticism of utilitarians, or maybe people, and not utilitarianism. Also, my point didn't even mention utilitarianism, so what does that have to do with the above?

Why wouldn't utilitarianism just weigh the human costs of those measures against proposed benefit of "improving the gene pool" and alternative possible remedies, like anything else?

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