This is actually a reasonable strategy. A pre-comitment to revenge is useful, but there's no point getting revenge on nature.
I suppose that works for pre-scientific, pre-rational thinking: back when you couldn't do a thing about nature, but you could do a thing about that schmuck looking at you funny.
However, now, as humanity's power grows, we can actually do something about nature: we can learn to predict earthquakes, build structures strong enough against calamity, vaccinate against pestilence, etc etc.
So the bias, I suppose, arises from evolution being too slow for human progress.
Today's post, The Bad Guy Bias was originally published on December 9, 2008. A summary:
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was True Sources of Disagreement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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