RobinHanson comments on Individual vs. Group Epistemic Rationality - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Wei_Dai 02 March 2010 09:46PM

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Comment author: RobinHanson 05 March 2010 03:10:28AM 4 points [-]

In general the ability to fool someone, and trick them into believing something they wouldn't really want to believe if they knew what you know, can be leveraged into tricking people to work toward some group goal, against their personal preferences. So sure it is possible that the ways that people are already tricked may happen to align in order to promote group goals. But really, how believable is it that human error tends to actually promote group goals? Sure, sometimes it will, and there will be some weak group selection features, but mostly no, individual errors are mostly also group errors.