I kind of predict that the results of installing heroic responsibility as a virtue, among average humans under average conditions, would be a) everyone stepping on everyone else’s toes, and b) 99% of them quitting a year later.
There’s a reason it’s called heroic responsibility: it’s for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world. In fact, the story background even guarantees this: there are only a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of wizards in Britain, and thus the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life. Further, he goes on adventures as an individual, and never has to engage in the kinds of large-scale real-life efforts that take the massive cooperation of large numbers of not-so-phoenix-quality individuals.
Which you very much do. You don’t need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who’s read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients’ health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic. An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.
Last bit of emphasis: you are both realer and better than Harry. He’s a fictional hero, and has to fight a few battles as an individual. You are a real nurse, and have to do your part to save hundreds of lives for decades of time. The fucked-up thing about children’s literature is that we never manage to get across just how small children’s heroes are, how little they do, and just how large the real world inhabited by adults is, and just how very difficult it is to live here, and just how fucking heroic each and every person who does the slightest bit of good here actually is.
There’s a reason it’s called heroic responsibility: it’s for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it.
NO! This is clearly not why it was called heroic responsibility and it is unlikely that the meaning has degraded so completely over time as to refer to the typical behaviour of fictional heroes. That isn’t the message of either the book or the excerpt quoted in the post.
Which you very much do. You don’t need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who’s read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients’ health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic.
Those who have read up on decision theory will be familiar with the term superrationality and notice that you are misusing the term. Incidentally, those who who are familiar with decision theory will also notice that ‘heroic responsibility’ is already assumed as part of the basic premise (ie. Agents actually taking actions that maximise expectation of desired things occurring doesn’t warrant any special labels like ‘heroic’ or ‘responsible’.) Harry is merely advocating using decision theory in a particular context where different reasoning processes are often substituted.
An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.
Harry knows this. If Harry happened to care about optimising the health system (more than he cared about other opportunities) then his ‘heroic responsibility’ would be to do whatever action moved the system in that direction most effectively. The same applies to any real humans who (actually) have that goal. Melodrama is not the point. (And the flaw in Harry that makes him Melodramatic isn’t his ‘heroic responsibility’, it’s his ego. A little more heroic responsibility would likely reduce his melodrama.)
The fucked-up thing about children’s literature
You seem to be confused either about which piece of literature is being discussed or about the target audience of said piece of literature.
Those who have read up on decision theory will be familiar with the term superrationality and notice that you are misusing the term.
Superrationality involves assuming that other people using the same reasoning as yourself will produce the same result as yourself, and so you need to decide what is best to do assuming everyone like yourself does it too. That does indeed seem to be what eli is talking about: you support the existing system, knowing that if you think it’s a good idea to support the system, so will other people who think like you, and the system will work.
You seem to be confused either about which piece of literature is being discussed or about the target audience of said piece of literature.
I don’t think he’s confused. While Eliezer’s fanfic isn’t children’s literature, the fact that Harry is a hero with plot armor is not something Eliezer invented; rather, it carries over from the source which is children’s literature.
There’s a reason it’s called heroic responsibility: it’s for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world.
But it’s my understanding that HPMOR was meant to teach about real-world reasoning.
Is this really supposed to be one of the HPMOR passages which is solely about the fictional character and is not meant to have any application to the real world except as an example of something not to do? It certainly doesn’t sound like that.
No, it’s pretty clear that the author intends this to be a real-world lesson. It’s a recurring theme in the Sequences.
I think Eli was disagreeing with the naive application of that lesson to real-world situations, especially ones where established systems are functional.
That said, I don’t want to put words in Eli’s mouth, so I’ll say instead that I was disagreeing in that way when I said something similar above.
Keep in mind that the author perceives himself pretty much like a stereotypical fictional hero: he is the One chosen to Save the World from the Robot Apocalypse, and maybe even Defeat Death and bring us Heaven. No wonder he thinks that advice to fictional heroes is applicable to him.
But when you actually try to apply that advice to people with a “real-life” job which involves coordinating with other people in a complex organization that has to ultimately produce measurable results, you run into problems.
A complex organization, for instance a hospital, needs clear rules detailing who is responsible for what. Sometimes this yields suboptimal outcomes: you notice that somebody is making a mistake and they won’t listen to you, or you don’t tell them because it would be socially unacceptable to do so. But the alternative where any decision can be second-guessed and argued at length until a consensus is reached would paralyse the organization and amplify the negative outcomes of the Dunner-Kruger effect.
Moreover, a culture of heroic responsibility would make accountability essentially impossible: If everybody is responsible for everything, then nobody is responsible for anything. Yes, Alice made a mistake, but how can we blame her without also blaming Bob for not noticing it and stopping her? Or Carol, or Dan, or Erin, and so on.
You and Swimmer963 are making the mistake of applying heroic responsibility only to optimising some local properties. Of course that will mean damaging the greater environment: applying “heroic responsibility” basically means you do your best AGI impression, so if you only optimise for a certain subset of your morality your results aren’t going to be pleasant.
Heroic responsibility only works if you take responsibility for everything. Not just the one patient you’re officially being held accountable for, not just the most likely Everett branches, not just the events you see with your own eyes. If your calling a halt to the human machine you are a part of truly has an expected negative effect, then it is your heroic responsibility to shut up and watch others make horrible mistakes.
A culture of heroic responsibility demands appropriate humility; it demands making damn sure what you’re doing is correct before defying your assigned duties. And if human psychology is such that punishing specific people for specific events works, then it is everyone’s heroic responsibility to make sure that rule exists.
Applying this in practice would, for most people, boil down to effective altruism: acquiring and pooling resources to enable a smaller group to optimise the world directly (after acquiring enough evidence of the group’s reliability that you know they’ll do a better job at it than you), trying to influence policy through political activism, and/or assorted meta-goals, all the while searching for ways to improve the system and obeying the law. Insisting you help directly instead of funding others would be statistical murder in the framework of heroic responsibility.
No: the concept that our ethics is utilitarian is independent from the concept that it is the only acceptable way of making decisions (where “acceptable” is an emotional/moral term).
What is an acceptable way of making decisions (where “acceptable” is an emotional/moral term) looks like an ethical question, how can it be independent from your ethics?
In ethics, the question would be answered by “yes, this ethical system is the only acceptable way to make decisions” by definition. In practice, this fact is not sufficient to make more than 0.01% of the world anywhere near heroically responsible (~= considering ethics the only emotionally/morally/role-followingly acceptable way of making decisions), so apparently the question is not decided by ethics.
Instead, roles and emotions play a large part in determining what is acceptable. In western society, the role of someone who is responsible for everything and not in the corresponding position of power is “the hero”. Yudkowsky (and HPJEV) might have chosen to be heroically responsible because he knows it is the consistent/rational conclusion of human morality and he likes being consistent/rational very much, or because he likes being a hero, or more likely a combination of both. The decision is made due to the role he wants to lead, not due to the ethics itself.
There are various types of consequentalism. The lack of distinction between ethical necessity and supererogation, and the general focus about optimizing the world, are typical of utilitarianism, which is in fact often associated with effective altruism (although it is not strictly necessary for it).
I think it applies to any and all of them just as well, but I (very stupidly) didn’t realize until now that utilitarianism is (a type of) consequentialism.
You and Swimmer963 are making the mistake of applying heroic responsibility only to optimising some local properties. Of course that will mean damaging the greater environment: “heroic responsibility” basically means you do your best AGI impression, so if you only optimise for a certain subset of your morality your results aren’t going to be pleasant.
Heroic responsibility only works if you take responsibility for everything. Not just the one patient you’re officially being held accountable for, not just the most likely Everett branches, not just the events you see with your own eyes. If your calling a halt to the human machine you are a part of truly has an expected negative effect, then it is your heroic responsibility to shut up and watch others make horrible mistakes.
A culture of heroic responsibility demands appropriate humility; it demands making damn sure what you’re doing is correct before defying your assigned duties. And if human psychology is such that a criminal justice system is still appropriate (where specific individuals are punished for specific events), then it is everyone’s job to make sure there is a criminal justice system.
Well, I can’t answer for Eliezer’s intentions, but I can repeat something he has often said about HPMoR: the only statements in HPMoR he is guaranteed to endorse with a straight face and high probability are those made about science/rationality, preferably in an expo-speak section, or those made by Godric Gryffindor, his author-avatar. Harry, Dumbledore, Hermione, and Quirrell are fictional characters: you are not necessarily meant to emulate them, though of course you can if you independently arrive to the conclusion that doing so is a Good Idea.
Is this really supposed to be one of the HPMOR passages which is solely about the fictional character and is not meant to have any application to the real world except as an example of something not to do?
I personally think it is one of the passages in which the unavoidable conceits of literature (ie: that the protagonist’s actions actually matter on a local-world-historical scale) overcome the standard operation of real life. Eliezer might have a totally different view, but of course, he keeps info about HPMoR close to his chest for maximum Fun.
the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life
I think we need a lot of local heroism. We have a few billions people on this planet, but we also have a few billion problems—even if we perhaps have only a few thousand repeating patterns of problems.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”. Sometimes we need a smart person to invent a solution to the problem. Sometimes we need thousands of people to implement that solution, and also to solve the unexpected problems with the solution, because in real life the solution is never perfect.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”.
That’s a good distinction and I would also throw in the third kind—“heroism within a generally disfunctional pattern which continues to exist because regular heroics keep it afloat”. This is related to the well-known management concept of the “firefighting mode”.
Superrationality isn’t a substitute for heroic responsibility, it’s a complement. Heroic responsibility is the ability to really ask the question, “Should I break the rules in a radical effort to change the world?” Superrationality is the tool that will allow you to usually get the correct, negative answer.
ETA: When Harry first articulates the concept of heroic responsibility, it’s conspicuously missing superrationality. I think that’s an instance of the character not being the author. But I think it’s later suggested that McGonagall could also use some heroic responsibility, and this clearly does not mean that she should be trying to take over the world.
I agree completely. McGonnagal has decision-making authority, so she is exactly the person who should be thinking in terms of absolute responsibility rather than in terms of convention.
This seems to misunderstand the definition of heroic responsibility in the first place. It doesn’t require that you’re better, smarter, luckier, or anything else than the average person. All that matters is the probability that you can beat the status quo, whether through focused actions to help one person, or systematic changes. If swimmer had strong enough priors that the doctor was neglecting their duty, swimmer would be justified in doing the stereotypically heroic thing. She didn’t, so she had to follow the doctors lead.
If everyone else cares deeply about solving a problem and there are a lot of smarter minds than your own focusing on the issue, you’re probably right to take the long approach and look for any systematic flaws instead of doing something that’ll probably be stupid. However, there’s lots of problems where the smartest, wealthiest people don’t actually have the motivation to solve the problem, and the majority of people who care are entrenched in the status quo, so a mere prole lacking HJPEVesque abilities benefits strongly from heroic responsibility.
And sometimes you can’t fix the system, but you can save one person and that is okay. It doesn’t make the system any better, and you’ll still need to fix it another day, but ignoring the cases you think you can solve because you lack the tools to tackle the root of the problem is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour heroic responsibility should be warning you about.
No, it doesn’t. If you’re uncertain about your own reasoning, discount the weight of your own evidence proportionally, and use the new value. In heuristic terms: err on the side of caution, by a lot if the price of failure is high.
Well said. The way I put it, the hero jumps into the cockpit and lands the plane in storm without once asking if there’s a certified pilot on board. It is “Heroic Responsibility” because it isn’t responsible without qualifiers. Nor is it heroic, it’s just a glitch due to the expected amount of getting laid times your primate brain not knowing about birth control times tiny probability of landing the plane yielding >1 surviving copy of your genes. Or, likely, a much cruder calculation, where the impressiveness appears to be greater than the chance of success seem small, on a background of severe miscalibration due to living in a well tuned society.
There’s a reason it’s called heroic responsibility: it’s for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world. In fact, the story background even guarantees this: there are only a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of wizards in Britain, and thus the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life. Further, he goes on adventures as an individual, and never has to engage in the kinds of large-scale real-life efforts that take the massive cooperation of large numbers of not-so-phoenix-quality individuals.
Which you very much do. You don’t need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who’s read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients’ health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic. An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.
Last bit of emphasis: you are both realer and better than Harry. He’s a fictional hero, and has to fight a few battles as an individual. You are a real nurse, and have to do your part to save hundreds of lives for decades of time. The fucked-up thing about children’s literature is that we never manage to get across just how small children’s heroes are, how little they do, and just how large the real world inhabited by adults is, and just how very difficult it is to live here, and just how fucking heroic each and every person who does the slightest bit of good here actually is.
NO! This is clearly not why it was called heroic responsibility and it is unlikely that the meaning has degraded so completely over time as to refer to the typical behaviour of fictional heroes. That isn’t the message of either the book or the excerpt quoted in the post.
Those who have read up on decision theory will be familiar with the term superrationality and notice that you are misusing the term. Incidentally, those who who are familiar with decision theory will also notice that ‘heroic responsibility’ is already assumed as part of the basic premise (ie. Agents actually taking actions that maximise expectation of desired things occurring doesn’t warrant any special labels like ‘heroic’ or ‘responsible’.) Harry is merely advocating using decision theory in a particular context where different reasoning processes are often substituted.
Harry knows this. If Harry happened to care about optimising the health system (more than he cared about other opportunities) then his ‘heroic responsibility’ would be to do whatever action moved the system in that direction most effectively. The same applies to any real humans who (actually) have that goal. Melodrama is not the point. (And the flaw in Harry that makes him Melodramatic isn’t his ‘heroic responsibility’, it’s his ego. A little more heroic responsibility would likely reduce his melodrama.)
You seem to be confused either about which piece of literature is being discussed or about the target audience of said piece of literature.
Superrationality involves assuming that other people using the same reasoning as yourself will produce the same result as yourself, and so you need to decide what is best to do assuming everyone like yourself does it too. That does indeed seem to be what eli is talking about: you support the existing system, knowing that if you think it’s a good idea to support the system, so will other people who think like you, and the system will work.
I don’t think he’s confused. While Eliezer’s fanfic isn’t children’s literature, the fact that Harry is a hero with plot armor is not something Eliezer invented; rather, it carries over from the source which is children’s literature.
But it’s my understanding that HPMOR was meant to teach about real-world reasoning.
Is this really supposed to be one of the HPMOR passages which is solely about the fictional character and is not meant to have any application to the real world except as an example of something not to do? It certainly doesn’t sound like that.
(Saying this with a straight face)
No, it’s pretty clear that the author intends this to be a real-world lesson. It’s a recurring theme in the Sequences.
I think Eli was disagreeing with the naive application of that lesson to real-world situations, especially ones where established systems are functional.
That said, I don’t want to put words in Eli’s mouth, so I’ll say instead that I was disagreeing in that way when I said something similar above.
Keep in mind that the author perceives himself pretty much like a stereotypical fictional hero: he is the One chosen to Save the World from the Robot Apocalypse, and maybe even Defeat Death and bring us Heaven. No wonder he thinks that advice to fictional heroes is applicable to him.
But when you actually try to apply that advice to people with a “real-life” job which involves coordinating with other people in a complex organization that has to ultimately produce measurable results, you run into problems.
A complex organization, for instance a hospital, needs clear rules detailing who is responsible for what. Sometimes this yields suboptimal outcomes: you notice that somebody is making a mistake and they won’t listen to you, or you don’t tell them because it would be socially unacceptable to do so. But the alternative where any decision can be second-guessed and argued at length until a consensus is reached would paralyse the organization and amplify the negative outcomes of the Dunner-Kruger effect.
Moreover, a culture of heroic responsibility would make accountability essentially impossible:
If everybody is responsible for everything, then nobody is responsible for anything. Yes, Alice made a mistake, but how can we blame her without also blaming Bob for not noticing it and stopping her? Or Carol, or Dan, or Erin, and so on.
You and Swimmer963 are making the mistake of applying heroic responsibility only to optimising some local properties. Of course that will mean damaging the greater environment: applying “heroic responsibility” basically means you do your best AGI impression, so if you only optimise for a certain subset of your morality your results aren’t going to be pleasant.
Heroic responsibility only works if you take responsibility for everything. Not just the one patient you’re officially being held accountable for, not just the most likely Everett branches, not just the events you see with your own eyes. If your calling a halt to the human machine you are a part of truly has an expected negative effect, then it is your heroic responsibility to shut up and watch others make horrible mistakes.
A culture of heroic responsibility demands appropriate humility; it demands making damn sure what you’re doing is correct before defying your assigned duties. And if human psychology is such that punishing specific people for specific events works, then it is everyone’s heroic responsibility to make sure that rule exists.
Applying this in practice would, for most people, boil down to effective altruism: acquiring and pooling resources to enable a smaller group to optimise the world directly (after acquiring enough evidence of the group’s reliability that you know they’ll do a better job at it than you), trying to influence policy through political activism, and/or assorted meta-goals, all the while searching for ways to improve the system and obeying the law. Insisting you help directly instead of funding others would be statistical murder in the framework of heroic responsibility.
So “heroic responsibility” just means “total utilitarianism”?
No: the concept that our ethics is utilitarian is independent from the concept that it is the only acceptable way of making decisions (where “acceptable” is an emotional/moral term).
What is an acceptable way of making decisions (where “acceptable” is an emotional/moral term) looks like an ethical question, how can it be independent from your ethics?
In ethics, the question would be answered by “yes, this ethical system is the only acceptable way to make decisions” by definition. In practice, this fact is not sufficient to make more than 0.01% of the world anywhere near heroically responsible (~= considering ethics the only emotionally/morally/role-followingly acceptable way of making decisions), so apparently the question is not decided by ethics.
Instead, roles and emotions play a large part in determining what is acceptable. In western society, the role of someone who is responsible for everything and not in the corresponding position of power is “the hero”. Yudkowsky (and HPJEV) might have chosen to be heroically responsible because he knows it is the consistent/rational conclusion of human morality and he likes being consistent/rational very much, or because he likes being a hero, or more likely a combination of both. The decision is made due to the role he wants to lead, not due to the ethics itself.
It just means ‘consequentalism’.
There are various types of consequentalism. The lack of distinction between ethical necessity and supererogation, and the general focus about optimizing the world, are typical of utilitarianism, which is in fact often associated with effective altruism (although it is not strictly necessary for it).
I think it applies to any and all of them just as well, but I (very stupidly) didn’t realize until now that utilitarianism is (a type of) consequentialism.
I know. That’s why I had to try to keep a straight face when saying that.
You and Swimmer963 are making the mistake of applying heroic responsibility only to optimising some local properties. Of course that will mean damaging the greater environment: “heroic responsibility” basically means you do your best AGI impression, so if you only optimise for a certain subset of your morality your results aren’t going to be pleasant.
Heroic responsibility only works if you take responsibility for everything. Not just the one patient you’re officially being held accountable for, not just the most likely Everett branches, not just the events you see with your own eyes. If your calling a halt to the human machine you are a part of truly has an expected negative effect, then it is your heroic responsibility to shut up and watch others make horrible mistakes.
A culture of heroic responsibility demands appropriate humility; it demands making damn sure what you’re doing is correct before defying your assigned duties. And if human psychology is such that a criminal justice system is still appropriate (where specific individuals are punished for specific events), then it is everyone’s job to make sure there is a criminal justice system.
Applying this in practice
Well, I can’t answer for Eliezer’s intentions, but I can repeat something he has often said about HPMoR: the only statements in HPMoR he is guaranteed to endorse with a straight face and high probability are those made about science/rationality, preferably in an expo-speak section, or those made by Godric Gryffindor, his author-avatar. Harry, Dumbledore, Hermione, and Quirrell are fictional characters: you are not necessarily meant to emulate them, though of course you can if you independently arrive to the conclusion that doing so is a Good Idea.
I personally think it is one of the passages in which the unavoidable conceits of literature (ie: that the protagonist’s actions actually matter on a local-world-historical scale) overcome the standard operation of real life. Eliezer might have a totally different view, but of course, he keeps info about HPMoR close to his chest for maximum Fun.
I would like to hear eli_sennesh’s response to this...
I think we need a lot of local heroism. We have a few billions people on this planet, but we also have a few billion problems—even if we perhaps have only a few thousand repeating patterns of problems.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”. Sometimes we need a smart person to invent a solution to the problem. Sometimes we need thousands of people to implement that solution, and also to solve the unexpected problems with the solution, because in real life the solution is never perfect.
That’s a good distinction and I would also throw in the third kind—“heroism within a generally disfunctional pattern which continues to exist because regular heroics keep it afloat”. This is related to the well-known management concept of the “firefighting mode”.
Superrationality isn’t a substitute for heroic responsibility, it’s a complement. Heroic responsibility is the ability to really ask the question, “Should I break the rules in a radical effort to change the world?” Superrationality is the tool that will allow you to usually get the correct, negative answer.
ETA: When Harry first articulates the concept of heroic responsibility, it’s conspicuously missing superrationality. I think that’s an instance of the character not being the author. But I think it’s later suggested that McGonagall could also use some heroic responsibility, and this clearly does not mean that she should be trying to take over the world.
I agree completely. McGonnagal has decision-making authority, so she is exactly the person who should be thinking in terms of absolute responsibility rather than in terms of convention.
This seems to misunderstand the definition of heroic responsibility in the first place. It doesn’t require that you’re better, smarter, luckier, or anything else than the average person. All that matters is the probability that you can beat the status quo, whether through focused actions to help one person, or systematic changes. If swimmer had strong enough priors that the doctor was neglecting their duty, swimmer would be justified in doing the stereotypically heroic thing. She didn’t, so she had to follow the doctors lead.
If everyone else cares deeply about solving a problem and there are a lot of smarter minds than your own focusing on the issue, you’re probably right to take the long approach and look for any systematic flaws instead of doing something that’ll probably be stupid. However, there’s lots of problems where the smartest, wealthiest people don’t actually have the motivation to solve the problem, and the majority of people who care are entrenched in the status quo, so a mere prole lacking HJPEVesque abilities benefits strongly from heroic responsibility.
And sometimes you can’t fix the system, but you can save one person and that is okay. It doesn’t make the system any better, and you’ll still need to fix it another day, but ignoring the cases you think you can solve because you lack the tools to tackle the root of the problem is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour heroic responsibility should be warning you about.
This assumes that you’re perfect at figuring out the probability that you can beat the status quo. Human beings are pretty bad at this.
No, it doesn’t. If you’re uncertain about your own reasoning, discount the weight of your own evidence proportionally, and use the new value. In heuristic terms: err on the side of caution, by a lot if the price of failure is high.
Well said. The way I put it, the hero jumps into the cockpit and lands the plane in storm without once asking if there’s a certified pilot on board. It is “Heroic Responsibility” because it isn’t responsible without qualifiers. Nor is it heroic, it’s just a glitch due to the expected amount of getting laid times your primate brain not knowing about birth control times tiny probability of landing the plane yielding >1 surviving copy of your genes. Or, likely, a much cruder calculation, where the impressiveness appears to be greater than the chance of success seem small, on a background of severe miscalibration due to living in a well tuned society.