First example that comes to my mind: Most cultures value killing their enemies (or something like that). However, LW culture prefers to find a way to make everyone happy (by inventing Friendly AI, donating to effective charity, etc.).
An uncharitable explanation would be that nerds are usually physically weak, and even if they happen to be strong individually, they would be still weak as a group (because most of them are weak as individuals, most people are not nerds, you cannot easily “convert” people into nerds, etc.)… so we have this “learned helplessness” about the basic human value of exterminating your enemies, and we deny having this value.
But if you would change the laws of universe so that understanding equations would allow you to directly shoot fireballs from your fingers (and the Bayes’ rule would be the most powerful fireball), LessWrong local groups would quickly turn into some kind of mage-Nazi militant groups, and we would all laugh diabolically at the pain of our enemies.
First example that comes to my mind: Most cultures value killing their enemies (or something like that). However, LW culture prefers to find a way to make everyone happy (by inventing Friendly AI, donating to effective charity, etc.).
An uncharitable explanation would be that nerds are usually physically weak, and even if they happen to be strong individually, they would be still weak as a group (because most of them are weak as individuals, most people are not nerds, you cannot easily “convert” people into nerds, etc.)… so we have this “learned helplessness” about the basic human value of exterminating your enemies, and we deny having this value.
But if you would change the laws of universe so that understanding equations would allow you to directly shoot fireballs from your fingers (and the Bayes’ rule would be the most powerful fireball), LessWrong local groups would quickly turn into some kind of mage-Nazi militant groups, and we would all laugh diabolically at the pain of our enemies.