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childofbaud comments on People who want to save the world - Less Wrong
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I meant "the list won't include a significant majority". (Possibly weak) evidence for this is the underfunding of organizations which actually appear to be trying to save the world (specifically GiveWell's charities and the SIAI).
I say possibly weak because this funding gap comes about as a result of people's behaviour, not their stated preference. So this could be seen as a failure of rationality rather than motivations. As mentioned on this site before, people lack a window on the back of their neck which allows you to read their volition, so it's difficult to distinguish between these two cases from the outside.
Also note the apparent lack of a thriving support community for people with these ambitions.
A Google search for "save the world" yields 11,000,000 results. A search for "harm the world" yields 242,000. Also, the top results for the latter are framed as cautionary tales, rather than normative instructions, or communities for how to accomplish the malignant goal.
Saving the world is a very commonly expressed sentiment, which is why compiling a list of people who want to save the world seems a little redundant to me. A list about people who have saved the world might be a tad more useful.
As far as I know, an infinitesimal amount of the world population consciously sets out to be evil, or to do harm to the world. It's more a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. I'm pretty sure there have been many studies about this, though I'd have to dig for them again. Perhaps someone else can post them.
Neither the stated desire nor the action implies donating to charities. Even you have admitted to this in the past.
I thought your claim might be based on the replies to your HELP! I want to do good thread. In that case, I thought I should point out that no equivalent "HELP! I want to do bad" or "HELP! I want to be completely benign" threads were ever created.
One could easily verify your claim by making such posts, and counting the replies. If one wanted to be really accurate about it, one could also go through the post history of the respondants, to be sure they're not just being contentious, but truly ill-intentioned.
Extending the survey to the population at large would be similarly trivial. One could tell people on the street about a one-question survey, and if they decide to participate, alternate between: "Do you want to save/improve the world?" and "Do you want to harm the world?"
(This might be a fun exercise for the Toronto LW group, now that I think about it. Both to find the answer out for ourselves, and to get people thinking about the subject. Because thinking often precedes action. Or at least it should... )
Stanislov Petrov, for one.
Only Disney villains want to harm the world. The alternative to "wanting to save the world" is "using world quality as a free variable when optimizing for other purposes" (that is, not caring). There's no reason for a "HELP! I want to do something unrelated to saving the world" thread.
A Google search for "using world quality as a free variable when optimizing for other purposes" yields... 0 results.
Though a search for "I don't care about the world" yields a respectable 58,600,000. If -cup is introduced in the search query, the result drops by 10,000,000 or so.
In somewhat related news, I'm starting to doubt my own heuristic.
Searching for "i want * more than anything in the world" -"to save the world" yields 17,700,000 results.