djcb comments on Celebrate Trivial Impetuses - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Alicorn 24 July 2009 10:36PM

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Comment author: djcb 25 July 2009 10:11:05AM 0 points [-]

Thanks.

Basically it seems that people are more likely to call harmful side-effects intentional, compared to beneficial ones.

I'm not sure this really is a bias; the harmful/beneficial cases are not exact counterparts: in the harmful case one could assume that the actor needs to mentally do something -- namely, 'overcoming the moral problem' or 'silence his/her conscience', which makes the harmful case indeed a bit more 'intentional'.