The “people are wonderful” bias is so pernicious and widespread I’ve never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for. I think most people greatly underestimate the size of this bias, and assume opinions either way are a form of mind-projection fallacy on the part of nice/evil people. In fact, it looks to me like this skew is the deeper origin of a lot of other biases, including the just-world fallacy, and the cause of a lot of default contentment with a lot of our institutions of science, government, etc. You could call it a meta-bias that causes the Hansonian stuff to go largely unnoticed.
I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it’s important but my writing skills are lacking.
The “people are extraordinarily more altruistic-motivated than they actually are” bias is so pernicious and widespread I’ve never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for.
I haven’t seen it articulated, or even mentioned. What is it? It sounds like this is just the common amnesia (or denial) of the rampant hypocrisy in most humans, but I’ve not heard that phrasing.
would it be fair to replace the first “are” (and maybe the second) with something that doesn’t imply essentialism or identity? “people are assumed to be” or “people claim to be” followed by “more altruistic than their behavior exhibits”?
The most salient example of the bias I can think of comes from reading interviews/books about the people who worked in the extermination camps in the holocaust. In my personal opinion, all the evidence points to them being literally normal people, representative of the average police officer or civil service member pre-1931. Holocaust historians nevertheless typically try very hard to outline some way in which Franz Stangl and crew were specially selected for lack of empathy, instead of raising the more obvious hypothesis that the median person is just not that upset by murdering strangers in a mildly indirected way, because the wonderful-humans bias demands a different conclusion.
This goes double in general for the entire public conception of killing as the most evil-feeling thing that humans can do, contrasted with actual memoirs of soldiers and the like who typically state that they were surprised how little they cared compared to the time they lied to their grandmother or whatever.
I may have the same bias, and may in fact believe it’s not a bias. People are highly mutable and contextual in how they perceive others, especially strangers, especially when they’re framed as outgroup.
The fact that a LOT of people could be killers and torturers in the right (or very wrong) circumstances doesn’t seem surprising to me, and this doesn’t contradict my beliefs that many or perhaps most do genuinely care about others with a better framing and circumstances.
There is certainly a selection effect, likewise for modern criminal-related work, that people with the ability to frame “otherness” and some individual-power drive, tend to be drawn to it. There are certainly lots of Germans who did not participate in those crimes, and lots of current humans who prefer to ignore the question of what violence is used against various subgroups*.
But there’s also a large dollop of “humans aren’t automatically ANYTHING”. They’re far more complex and reactive than a simple view can encompass.
* OH! that’s a bias that’s insanely common. I said “violence against subgroups” rather than “violence by individuals against individuals, motivated by membership and identification with different subgroups”.
I’ve gone back and forth with myself about this sort of stuff. Are humans altruistic? Good? Evil?
On the one hand, yes, I think lc is right about how in some situations people exhibit just an extraordinary amount of altruism and sympathy. But on the other hand, there are other situations where people do the opposite: they’ll, I dunno, jump into a lake at a risk to their own life to save a drowning stranger. Or risk their lives running into a burning building to save strangers (lots of volunteers did this during 9/11).
I think the explanation is what Dagon is saying about how mutable and context-dependent people are. In some situations people will act extremely altruistically. In others they’ll act extremely selfishly.
The way that I like to think about this is in terms of “moral weight”. How many utilons to John Doe would it take for you to give up one utilon of your own? Like, would you trade 1 utilon of your own so that John Doe can get 100,000 utilons? 1,000? 100? 10? Answering these questions, you can come up with “moral weights” to assign to different types of people. But I think that people don’t really assign a moral weight and then act consistently. In some situations they’ll act as if their answer to my previous question is 100,000, and in other situations they’ll act like it’s 0.00001.
My model of utility (and the standard one, as far as I can tell) doesn’t work that way. No rational agent ever gives up a utilon—that is the thing they are maximizing. I think of it as “how many utilons do you get from thinking about John Doe’s increased satisfaction (not utilons, as you have no access to his, though you could say “inferred utilons”) compared to the direct utilons you would otherwise get”.
Those moral weights are “just” terms in your utility function.
And, since humans aren’t actually rational, and don’t have consistent utility functions, actions that imply moral weights are highly variable and contextual.
actual memoirs of soldiers and the like who typically state that they were surprised how little they cared compared to the time they lied to their grandmother or whatever.
Not really memoirs but a German documentary about WWII might be of interest for you. Der unbekannte Soldat
I watched on Amazon Prime and you can still find the title there in a search, not sure if it is only available for rent/sale now or if you can stream with Prime membership.
I’m not sure to what extent this is helpful, or if it’s an example of the dynamic you’re refuting, but Duncan Sabien recently wrote a post that intersects with this topic:
Also, if your worldview is such that, like. *Everyone* makes awful comments like that in the locker room, *everyone* does angle-shooting and tries to scheme and scam their way to the top, *everyone* is looking out for number one, *everyone* lies …
… then *given* that premise, it makes sense to view Trump in a positive light. He’s no worse than everybody else, he’s just doing the normal things that everyone does, with the *added layer* that he’s brave enough and candid enough and strong enough that he *doesn’t have to pretend he doesn’t.*
Admirable! Refreshingly honest and clean!
So long as you can’t conceive of the fact that lots of people are actually just …...............… good. They’re not fighting against urges to be violent or to rape, they’re not biting their tongues when they want to say scathing and hurtful things, they’re not jealous and bitter and willing to throw others under the bus to get ahead. They’re just … fundamentally not interested in any of that.
(To be clear: if you are feeling such impulses all the time and you’re successfully containing them or channeling them and presenting a cooperative and prosocial mask: that is *also* good, and you are a good person by virtue of your deliberate choice to be good. But like. Some people just really *are* the way that other people have to *make* themselves be.)
It sort of vaguely rhymes, in my head, with the type of person who thinks that *everyone* is constantly struggling against the urge to engage in homosexual behavior, how dare *those* people give up the good fight and just *indulge* themselves … without realizing that, hey, bro, did you know that a lot of people are just straight? And that your internal experience is, uh, *different* from theirs?
Where it connects is that if someone sees [making the world a better place] like simply selecting a better Nash Equilibria, they absolutely will spend time exploring solutionspace/thinking through strategies similar to Goal Factoring or Babble and Prune. Lots of people throughout history have yearned for a better world in a lot of different ways, with varying awareness of the math behind Nash Equilibira, or the transhumanist and rationalist perspectives on civilization (e.g. map & territory & biases & scope insensitivity for rationalism, cryonics/anti-aging for transhumanism).
But their goal here is largely steering culture away from nihilism (since culture is a Nash Equilibria) which means steering many people away from themselves, or at least the selves that they would have been. Maybe that’s pretty minor in this case e.g. because feeling moderate amounts of empathy and living in a better society are both fun, but either way, changing a society requires changing people, and thinking really creatively about ways to change people tears down lots of chesterton-Schelling fences and it’s very easy to make really big damaging mistakes in the process (because you need to successfully predict and avoid all mistakes as part of the competent pruning process, and actually measurably consistently succeeding at this is thinkoomph not just creative intelligence).
Add in conflict theory to the mistake theory I’ve described here, factor in unevenly distributed intelligence and wealth in addition to unevenly distributed traits like empathy and ambition and suspicion-towards-outgroup (e.g. different combinations of all 5 variables), and you can imagine how conflict and resentment would accumulate on both sides over the course of generations. There’s tons of examples in addition to Ayn Rand and Wokeness.
It’s worth separating what people actually believe about how altruistic other people are from what they pretend to believe about the altruism of other people.
If you ask someone whether they believe that there’s a chance that their partner would cheat on them, they are most likely to tell you that their partner would cheat on them. The same person might take a few signs that point in the direction of their partner cheating as a huge problem.
I would also expect that beliefs differ a lot between people.
I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it’s important but my writing skills are lacking.
I’m not looking to write a post about this, but I’d be happy to go back and forth with you in the comments about it (no payment required). Maybe that back and forth will help you formulate your thoughts.
For starters, I’m not sure if I understand the bias that you are trying to point to. Is it that people assume others are more altruistic than they actually are? Do any examples come to your mind other than this?
People accept that being altruistic is good before actually thinking if they want to do it. And they also choose weird axioms for being altruistic that their intuitions may or may not agree with (like valuing the life of someone in the future the same amount of someone today).
The “people are wonderful” bias is so pernicious and widespread I’ve never actually seen it articulated in detail or argued for. I think most people greatly underestimate the size of this bias, and assume opinions either way are a form of mind-projection fallacy on the part of nice/evil people. In fact, it looks to me like this skew is the deeper origin of a lot of other biases, including the just-world fallacy, and the cause of a lot of default contentment with a lot of our institutions of science, government, etc. You could call it a meta-bias that causes the Hansonian stuff to go largely unnoticed.
I would be willing to pay someone to help draft a LessWrong post for me about this; I think it’s important but my writing skills are lacking.
I haven’t seen it articulated, or even mentioned. What is it? It sounds like this is just the common amnesia (or denial) of the rampant hypocrisy in most humans, but I’ve not heard that phrasing.
would it be fair to replace the first “are” (and maybe the second) with something that doesn’t imply essentialism or identity? “people are assumed to be” or “people claim to be” followed by “more altruistic than their behavior exhibits”?
The most salient example of the bias I can think of comes from reading interviews/books about the people who worked in the extermination camps in the holocaust. In my personal opinion, all the evidence points to them being literally normal people, representative of the average police officer or civil service member pre-1931. Holocaust historians nevertheless typically try very hard to outline some way in which Franz Stangl and crew were specially selected for lack of empathy, instead of raising the more obvious hypothesis that the median person is just not that upset by murdering strangers in a mildly indirected way, because the wonderful-humans bias demands a different conclusion.
This goes double in general for the entire public conception of killing as the most evil-feeling thing that humans can do, contrasted with actual memoirs of soldiers and the like who typically state that they were surprised how little they cared compared to the time they lied to their grandmother or whatever.
I may have the same bias, and may in fact believe it’s not a bias. People are highly mutable and contextual in how they perceive others, especially strangers, especially when they’re framed as outgroup.
The fact that a LOT of people could be killers and torturers in the right (or very wrong) circumstances doesn’t seem surprising to me, and this doesn’t contradict my beliefs that many or perhaps most do genuinely care about others with a better framing and circumstances.
There is certainly a selection effect, likewise for modern criminal-related work, that people with the ability to frame “otherness” and some individual-power drive, tend to be drawn to it. There are certainly lots of Germans who did not participate in those crimes, and lots of current humans who prefer to ignore the question of what violence is used against various subgroups*.
But there’s also a large dollop of “humans aren’t automatically ANYTHING”. They’re far more complex and reactive than a simple view can encompass.
* OH! that’s a bias that’s insanely common. I said “violence against subgroups” rather than “violence by individuals against individuals, motivated by membership and identification with different subgroups”.
Yeah, I echo this.
I’ve gone back and forth with myself about this sort of stuff. Are humans altruistic? Good? Evil?
On the one hand, yes, I think lc is right about how in some situations people exhibit just an extraordinary amount of altruism and sympathy. But on the other hand, there are other situations where people do the opposite: they’ll, I dunno, jump into a lake at a risk to their own life to save a drowning stranger. Or risk their lives running into a burning building to save strangers (lots of volunteers did this during 9/11).
I think the explanation is what Dagon is saying about how mutable and context-dependent people are. In some situations people will act extremely altruistically. In others they’ll act extremely selfishly.
The way that I like to think about this is in terms of “moral weight”. How many utilons to John Doe would it take for you to give up one utilon of your own? Like, would you trade 1 utilon of your own so that John Doe can get 100,000 utilons? 1,000? 100? 10? Answering these questions, you can come up with “moral weights” to assign to different types of people. But I think that people don’t really assign a moral weight and then act consistently. In some situations they’ll act as if their answer to my previous question is 100,000, and in other situations they’ll act like it’s 0.00001.
My model of utility (and the standard one, as far as I can tell) doesn’t work that way. No rational agent ever gives up a utilon—that is the thing they are maximizing. I think of it as “how many utilons do you get from thinking about John Doe’s increased satisfaction (not utilons, as you have no access to his, though you could say “inferred utilons”) compared to the direct utilons you would otherwise get”.
Those moral weights are “just” terms in your utility function.
And, since humans aren’t actually rational, and don’t have consistent utility functions, actions that imply moral weights are highly variable and contextual.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. I guess utility isn’t really the right term to use here.
Recommendations for such memoirs?
Not really memoirs but a German documentary about WWII might be of interest for you. Der unbekannte Soldat
I watched on Amazon Prime and you can still find the title there in a search, not sure if it is only available for rent/sale now or if you can stream with Prime membership.
I’m not sure to what extent this is helpful, or if it’s an example of the dynamic you’re refuting, but Duncan Sabien recently wrote a post that intersects with this topic:
Where it connects is that if someone sees [making the world a better place] like simply selecting a better Nash Equilibria, they absolutely will spend time exploring solutionspace/thinking through strategies similar to Goal Factoring or Babble and Prune. Lots of people throughout history have yearned for a better world in a lot of different ways, with varying awareness of the math behind Nash Equilibira, or the transhumanist and rationalist perspectives on civilization (e.g. map & territory & biases & scope insensitivity for rationalism, cryonics/anti-aging for transhumanism).
But their goal here is largely steering culture away from nihilism (since culture is a Nash Equilibria) which means steering many people away from themselves, or at least the selves that they would have been. Maybe that’s pretty minor in this case e.g. because feeling moderate amounts of empathy and living in a better society are both fun, but either way, changing a society requires changing people, and thinking really creatively about ways to change people tears down lots of chesterton-Schelling fences and it’s very easy to make really big damaging mistakes in the process (because you need to successfully predict and avoid all mistakes as part of the competent pruning process, and actually measurably consistently succeeding at this is thinkoomph not just creative intelligence).
Add in conflict theory to the mistake theory I’ve described here, factor in unevenly distributed intelligence and wealth in addition to unevenly distributed traits like empathy and ambition and suspicion-towards-outgroup (e.g. different combinations of all 5 variables), and you can imagine how conflict and resentment would accumulate on both sides over the course of generations. There’s tons of examples in addition to Ayn Rand and Wokeness.
It’s worth separating what people actually believe about how altruistic other people are from what they pretend to believe about the altruism of other people.
If you ask someone whether they believe that there’s a chance that their partner would cheat on them, they are most likely to tell you that their partner would cheat on them. The same person might take a few signs that point in the direction of their partner cheating as a huge problem.
I would also expect that beliefs differ a lot between people.
I’m not looking to write a post about this, but I’d be happy to go back and forth with you in the comments about it (no payment required). Maybe that back and forth will help you formulate your thoughts.
For starters, I’m not sure if I understand the bias that you are trying to point to. Is it that people assume others are more altruistic than they actually are? Do any examples come to your mind other than this?
Related: Saving the world sucks
People accept that being altruistic is good before actually thinking if they want to do it. And they also choose weird axioms for being altruistic that their intuitions may or may not agree with (like valuing the life of someone in the future the same amount of someone today).
“The x are more y than they actually are” seems like a contradiction?
Rewrote to be more clear.