Mind Projection Fallacy

35 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 March 2008 12:29AM

Followup toHow an Algorithm Feels From Inside

Monsterwithgirl_2In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing, as lovingly depicted on many ancient magazine covers.  Oddly enough, the aliens never go after men in torn shirts.

Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female?  It seems rather unlikely.  To put it mildly.

People don't make mistakes like that by deliberately reasoning:  "All possible minds are likely to be wired pretty much the same way, therefore a bug-eyed monster will find human females attractive."  Probably the artist did not even think to ask whether an alien perceives human females as attractive.  Instead, a human female in a torn dress is sexy—inherently so, as an intrinsic property.

They who went astray did not think about the alien's evolutionary history; they focused on the woman's torn dress.  If the dress were not torn, the woman would be less sexy; the alien monster doesn't enter into it.

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