Eliezer Yudkowsky

Spending a billion dollars correctly, that's harder.

If you're wrong... To solve a number of things.

Stuff has to be easier than I think it is.

The first time you're building a rocket,

Being wrong is, in a certain sense, quite easy.

Happening to be wrong in a way where the rocket goes twice as far and half the fuel and lands exactly where you hoped it would, most cases of being wrong make it harder to build a rocket, harder to have it not explode, cause it to require more fuel than you hoped, cause it to land off target.

Being wrong in a way that makes stuff easier, that's not the usual project management story.

There's no examples in history where we... Oh, there's all kinds of things that are similar if you generalize incorrectly the right way and aren't fooled by misleading metaphors.

Like what?

Humans.

being misaligned on inclusive genetic fitness.

So inclusive genetic fitness is like not just your reproductive fitness, but also the fitness of your relatives, the people who share some fraction of your genes.

The old joke is, would you give your life to save your brother?

They once asked a biologist, I think it was Haldane, and Haldane said, no, but I would give my life to save two brothers or eight cousins.

Because a brother, on average, shares half your genes, and cousin, on average, shares an eighth of your genes.

So that's inclusive genetic fitness.

And you can view natural selection as optimizing humans exclusively around this one very simple criterion.

Like how much more frequent did your genes become in the next generation?

In fact, that just is natural selection.

It doesn't optimize for that, but rather the process of genes becoming more frequent is that.