You are misreading Jacobian

Plausible guess, but actually my error was different: I hadn't noticed the bit of Jacobian's comment you quote there; I read what you wrote and made the mistake of assuming it was correct.

Those words "once you've decided on a course of action" were your words. I just quoted them. It does indeed appear that they don't quite correspond to what Jacobian wrote, and I should have spotted that, but the original misrepresentation of Jacobian's position was yours rather than mine.

(But I should make clear that you misrepresented Jacobian's position by making it look less unreasonable and less easy for you to attack, so there's something highly creditable about that.)

One perhaps useful analogy for super-intelligence going wrong is corporations.

We create corporations to serve our ends. They can do things we cannot do as individuals. But in subtle and not-so-subtle ways corporations can behave in very destructive ways. One example might be the way that they pursue profit at the cost of in some cases ruining people's lives, damaging the environment, corrupting the political process.

By analogy it seems plausible that super-intelligences may behave in a way that is against our interests.

It is not valid to assume that a super-intelligence will be smart enough to discern true human interests, or that it will be motivated to act on this knowledge.

You are essentially saying that once you've decided on a course of action, you should turn yourself into a sociopath.

Sounds terrible! But, wait, once you've decided on a course of action. The main problem with sociopaths is that they do horrible things and do them very effectively, right? Someone who chooses what to do like a non-sociopath and then executes those plans like a sociopath may sound scary and creepy and all, but it's not at all clear that it's actually a bad idea.

(I am not convinced that Jacobian is actually arguing that you decide on a course of action and then turn yourself into a sociopath. But even that strawman version of what he's saying is, I think, much less terrible than you obviously want readers to think it is.)

With empathy, it turns out that Germans were much more likely to empathize with other Germans than with Juden. With empathy, everyone was cheering as the witches burned.

Moral progress is the progress of knowledge. Slavers in the antebellum South convinced themselves that they were doing a favor to the slaves because the latter couldn't survive by themselves in an advanced economy. A hundred years later, they changed their minds more than they changed their hearts. We (some of us) have learned that coercion is almost always bad, making world saving plans that involve a lot of coercion tend to fail, and preserving people's freedom (blacks, witches and Jews included) increases everyone's welfare.

Is empathy part of one's motivation to even pursue moral progress? Perhaps, but if so it's a very deep part of us that will never be discarded. All I'm saying is that whenever you have finally decided that you should make the world a better place, at that point emotional empathy is a bias that you should discard when choosing a course of action.

Genetic factors (such as lower IQ)

What is the best source for this in your view?

Historical factors, Cultural factors, Economic factors

Is it your view that past slavery in America still has a large impact on African Americans in the present day U.S.?

It seems obvious to me that it does, and that the effects are wide and deep, as slavery (and Jim Crow) is relatively recent history—We're only a handful of generations from a time where a race of people was enslaved and systemically kept from accumulating wealth and education.

...I don't think a reasonable open discussion is possible.

Meh. Maybe. I'd like to believe I'm a reasonable guy. My views on these issues are largely ignorant and I'm open to learning.

So, if the emotional empathy should be discarded, why should I help all those strangers? The only answer that the link suggests is "social propriety".

But social propriety is a fickle thing. Sometimes it asks you to forgive the debts of the destitute, and sometimes it asks you to burn the witches. Without empathy, why shouldn't you cheer at the flames licking the evil witch's body? Without empathy, if there are some kulaks or Juden standing in the way of the perfect society, why shouldn't you kill them in the most efficient manner at your disposal?

Can/will you TL;DR your view?

I was wondering about that. In what sense is this place a graveyard?

It's too bad really. I love Scott's blog, but I've been looking for something with a format more like LW.

Why is this?

The problem is that the statistics don't show the claimed bias. Normalized on a per-police-encounter basis, white cops (or cops-in-general) don't appear to shoot black suspects more often than they shoot white suspects. However, police interact with black people more frequently, so the absolute proportion of black shooting victims is elevated.

Can you provide any sources for this?

The fact that the incidence of police encounters with blacks is elevated would be the actual social problem worth addressing, but the reasons for the elevated incidence of police-black encounters do not make a nice soundbite.

Is the incidence of police encounters with blacks elevated?

What are the reasons?