Lack of curiosity made people lose money to Madoff. This you already know - people did not due their due diligence.

Here's what Bienes, a partner of Madoff's who passed clients to him, said to the PBS interviewer for The Madoff Affair (before the 10 minute mark) when asked how he thought Madoff could promise 20%:

Bienes: ‘How do I know? How do you split an atom, I know that you can split them, I don’t know how you do it. How does an airplane fly? I don’t ask.’ ‘Did you ask him?’ ’Never! Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it!’

And a minute later: ‘Did you ever think to yourself, this is just too easy, this is too good?’ Bienes: ‘I said ‘I’m a little too lucky. Why am I so fortunate?’ And then I came up with the answer, my wife and I came up with the answer: ‘God wanted us to have this. God gave us this.’ '

Are you kidding me? I'm staring right now, beside me, at a textbook chapter filled with catalogings of human values, with a list of ten that seem universal, with theories on how to classify values, all with citations of dozens of studies: Chapter 7, Values, of Chris Peterson's A Primer In Positive Psychology.

LessWrong is so insular sometimes. Like lionhearted's post Flashes of Nondecisionmaking yesterday---as if neither he nor most of the commenters had heard that we are, indeed, driven much by habit (e.g. The Power of Habit; Self-Directed Behavior; The Procrastionation Equation; ALL GOOD SELF HELP EVER), and that the folk conception of free will might be wrong (which has been long established; argued e.g. in Sam Harris's Free Will).

If your point is that the best way to achieve the terminal values of a superhero is to have instrumental values of a supervillain, then you better offer a way to cope with the unreliable wetware your utility computation runs on.

I would expect some more "meat" from a Main post; for example, some hard empirical data that points to the effectiveness of thinking without internal censors -- assuming that anyone had ever studied this issue, of course.

If this gets upvoted highly, I will update in favor of LessWrong continuing to become more in-group-y, more cutesy, and less attached-to-actual-change-y. It's becoming so much delicious candy!

Some atheistic films not mentioned in the OP:

Agora, Bad Boy Bubby, Chocolat, Inherit the Wind, The Ledge, The Wicker Man, Planet of the Apes, The Magdalene Sisters, There Will Be Blood, The Tree of Life, The Golden Compass, The Apostle, Black Robe, Breaking the Waves, Creation (about Darwin), The Crucible, Contact, Hanna and Her Sisters, Paul, Saved, Whatever Works, The White Ribbon, God on Trial, Watchmen.

Indeed, it's good to be aware of the narrative-bias on some level, just not too aware. More like an exception handling routine that's just checking for out-of-bounds errors.

Welcome to LW, glad that my little comment sparked you to make your first comment. :)

You're discounting the case where precisely because it fits the narrative, it is effective.

Getting coffee and building the narrative of "I'm a Hard Worker who will now do his Hard Work with Focus and Determination, look at me getting ready with coffee" is priming yourself for that hard work, the narrative is part of your motivational structure and embellishes your Focus and Determination.

Being too aware of "it's only plain old me, whether in a uniform, or in an office, or at Starbucks" is needlessly sabotaging an often effective placebo-like effect that relies on your internal narrative.

Epistemologically useful, possibly, but contraindicated as an instrumentally useful habit.

A lot of people don't consider failure to exist the same as dying. Of course, we need some level of procreation as long as there is death, and humanity would probably continue to expand even then.

Alicorn, a deontologist, wishes that a certain consequence (the salvation of the world) obtain. Whether she is involved in producing that consequence or not.

Giles, presumably a consequentialist, phrases his own wish so as to egoistically place himself at the site of the action.

The juxtaposition carries a certain irony.