1) Almost everyone really is better than average at something. People massively overrate that something. We imagine intelligence to be useful largely due to this bias. The really useful thing would have been to build a FAS, or Friendly Artificial Strong. Only someone who could do hundreds of 100 kilogram curls with either hand could possible create such a thing however. (Zuckerberg already created a Friendly Artificial Popular)
2) Luck, an invisible, morally charged and slightly agenty but basically non-anthropomorphic tendency for things to go well for some people in some domains of varying generality and badly for other people in various domains really does dominate our lives. People can learn to be lucky, and almost everything else they can learn is fairly useless by comparison.
3) Everyone hallucinates a large portion of their experienced reality. Most irrationality can be more usefully interpreted from outside as flat-out hallucination. That's why you (for every given you) seem so rational and no-one else does.
4) The human brain has many millions of idiosyncratic failure modes. We all display hundreds of them. The psychological disorders that we know of are all extremely rare and extremely precise, so if you ever met two people with the same disorder it would be obvious. Named psychological disorders are the result of people with degrees noticing two people who actually have the same disorder and other people reading their descriptions and pattern-matching noise against it. There are, for instance, 1300 bipolar people (based on the actual precise pattern which inspired the invention of the term) in the world but hundreds of thousands of people have disorders which if you squint hard look slightly like bipolar.
5) It's easy to become immortal or to acquire "super powers" via a few minutes a day of the right sort of exercise and trivial tweaks to your diet if you do both for a few decades. It's also introspectively obvious how to do so if you think about the question but due to subtle social pressures against it no-one overcomes akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, etc in this domain.
6) All medicines and psychoactive substances are purely placebos.
7) Pleasure is a confusion in a different way from the obvious, specifically, everything said to be pleasurable is actually something painful but necessary that we convince ourselves to do via propaganda because there is no other way to overcome the akrasia that would result if we did not or a lost purpose descended from some such propaganda. Things we are actually motivated to do without propaganda, we do without thinking about it, feel no need to name, would endorse tiling the universe with without hesitation if it occurred to us to do so.
I wouldn't believe
8) The cheap rebuttal to Pascal's Wager, the god of punishing saints, actually exists except it's actually the Zeus of punishing virtuous Greek Pagans, rewarding hubristic Greek Pagans, and ignoring us infidels who ignore it despite the ubiquitous evidence all around us. I would believe that the AGI had a good reason for wanting to tell me that the above was the case if it told me though.
9) Most of Eliezer's examples. To be credible they should be disturbing, not merely improbable. Our beliefs aren't shown to be massively invalid with respect to non-disturbing data. The one about animals probably qualifies as credible though.
10) Uh, oh, Cyc will hard take-off if one more fact is programmed into it. I'm not sure I can stop it in time.
Bonus belief
This question has doomed us. People who could possibly program a FAI will, once thinking about this question in a semi-humorous manner, invariably spread the meme to all their friends and be distracted from future progress.
...4) The human brain has many millions of idiosyncratic failure modes. We all display hundreds of them. The psychological disorders that we know of are all extremely rare and extremely precise, so if you ever met two people with the same disorder it would be obvious. Named psychological disorders are the result of people with degrees noticing two people who actually have the same disorder and other people reading their descriptions and pattern-matching noise against it. There are, for instance, 1300 bipolar people (based on the actual precise pattern which i
Human beings are all crazy. And if you tap on our brains just a little, we get so crazy that even other humans notice. Anosognosics are one of my favorite examples of this; people with right-hemisphere damage whose left arms become paralyzed, and who deny that their left arms are paralyzed, coming up with excuses whenever they're asked why they can't move their arms.
A truly wonderful form of brain damage - it disables your ability to notice or accept the brain damage. If you're told outright that your arm is paralyzed, you'll deny it. All the marvelous excuse-generating rationalization faculties of the brain will be mobilized to mask the damage from your own sight. As Yvain summarized:
I find it disturbing that the brain has such a simple macro for absolute denial that it can be invoked as a side effect of paralysis. That a single whack on the brain can both disable a left-side motor function, and disable our ability to recognize or accept the disability. Other forms of brain damage also seem to both cause insanity and disallow recognition of that insanity - for example, when people insist that their friends have been replaced by exact duplicates after damage to face-recognizing areas.
And it really makes you wonder...
...what if we all have some form of brain damage in common, so that none of us notice some simple and obvious fact? As blatant, perhaps, as our left arms being paralyzed? Every time this fact intrudes into our universe, we come up with some ridiculous excuse to dismiss it - as ridiculous as "It's my daughter's arm" - only there's no sane doctor watching to pursue the argument any further. (Would we all come up with the same excuse?)
If the "absolute denial macro" is that simple, and invoked that easily...
Now, suppose you built an AI. You wrote the source code yourself, and so far as you can tell by inspecting the AI's thought processes, it has no equivalent of the "absolute denial macro" - there's no point damage that could inflict on it the equivalent of anosognosia. It has redundant differently-architected systems, defending in depth against cognitive errors. If one system makes a mistake, two others will catch it. The AI has no functionality at all for deliberate rationalization, let alone the doublethink and denial-of-denial that characterizes anosognosics or humans thinking about politics. Inspecting the AI's thought processes seems to show that, in accordance with your design, the AI has no intention to deceive you, and an explicit goal of telling you the truth. And in your experience so far, the AI has been, inhumanly, well-calibrated; the AI has assigned 99% certainty on a couple of hundred occasions, and been wrong exactly twice that you know of.
Arguably, you now have far better reason to trust what the AI says to you, than to trust your own thoughts.
And now the AI tells you that it's 99.9% sure - having seen it with its own cameras, and confirmed from a hundred other sources - even though (it thinks) the human brain is built to invoke the absolute denial macro on it - that...
...what?
What's the craziest thing the AI could tell you, such that you would be willing to believe that the AI was the sane one?
(Some of my own answers appear in the comments.)