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Jonii comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong
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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 all. Even if it was often useful to stay in a safe zone, there doesn't really seem to be any easy way to snap them out of it. No magic word, no violation of any sort of values makes anyone stand up and fight. I could literally tell people that millions are dying in vain(aging) or that the whole world is at stake(existential risks), and most people simply don't care.
At least, that's how I see it. I figure that rare exceptions to the rule there can be explained as a cost of signalling something, requirements of the spot in the conformist space you happen to be occupy or something like that.
I'm not particularly fond of this position, but I'm simply lacking a better alternative.