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Comment by dchess | Hacker News Reader

The self destruct scenario for Jev is not equivalent to the Trolley problem. The equivalent would be to ask humans whether they would redirect the trolley to kill themselves to save 5 strangers. How many would make that choice? Self-preservation is a strong instinct.

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true, I suspect many would throw a whole country under that trolley before themselves

As Twenty One Pilots said:

> I'd die for you, that's easy to say

> We have a list of people that we would take

> A bullet for them, a bullet for you

> A bullet for everybody in this room

> But I don't seem to see many bullets comin' through

> See many bullets comin' through

> Metaphorically, I'm the man

> But literally, I don't know what I'd do

So I suspect you're right. But I also suspect many people who see themselves as the "save the country" group would really be in the "save themselves" group, if push came to shove.

Read Smith's Theory Of Moral Sentiment. Especially his comparison between reading about a faraway disaster and a more personal loss. It's been awhile but I think Smith would say there's a difference between how people would think about that choice and what they would do.

sure this is why fascists often build systems that separate the act from the outcome

Not really. Jev is NOT a HUMAN.

But models are trained on human data, human writings, and human thoughts. So models are acting to imitate humans.

Yeah but the explicit goal of LLMs is to mimic human chains of thought.

Which means, they have to value human lives higher than LLM servers.

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