Banish the Clippy-creating Bias Demon!

:facepalm:

This is dark artsy to the point of self-parody. The outcome seems to me highly dependent on the parity of the number of meta levels the viewer goes to.

I would suggest that this is a useful thing to do on an individual level (to adjust for scope insensitivity and so forth) but a terrible thing to do on a group level (because it's mind-killing). Smells too much like the Yellow Peril for my taste.

The Anthropomorphization Cannon is a powerful weapon, and if it were to fall into the wrong hands...

Many religions do anthropomorphize evil - the devil may not actually exist, but we may all be better off if we talk about him as if he did.

I suspect that there are quite a few things like this, where religion is kinda right, as long as you don't take it too literally. Maybe the best solution isn't to reject religion wholesale, but to reform it so that it's tacitly acknowledged that it isn't really true, a bit like Santa Claus, or professional wrestling. Arguably that may already be the attitude of many Anglicans and Unitarian Universalists.

I'm reminded of this early GiveWell post :)

"When I was younger, I loved playing video games. [...] I just liked killing bad guys. Well, more than that, I hated not killing bad guys. When Heat Man killed my guy and stood around smugly, I wanted to throw the TV across the room, and I couldn’t stop until he was dead.

What sucked about this experience was that it was all fake, and in the back of my head I knew that. In the end I felt pretty empty and lame. Enter altruism – where the bad guys are ACTUALLY BAD GUYS. [...] it’s infinitely better because it’s real. I don’t care whether the kids are cute, or whether the organizations are nice to me, or whether my friends like my decisions. As with video games, I probably spend 99% of my time frustrated rather than happy. But … Malaria Man just pisses me off. It’s that simple." http://blog.givewell.org/2007/04/03/charity-the-video-game-thats-real/

I don't think anthropomorphising al qaeda in the form of Osama Bin Laden or demonizing Saddam Hussein was a net good for america. Framing the arguments over drug control as "The War On Drugs" has almost certainly led to the loss of billions of dollars and many lives. Do you really think encouraging this idea in general is good?

Your example political speech makes me want to just run for office and do it.

"I now solemnly vow, on all honors, to rid our country of the vile terrorists who call themselves the Slippery Baths. If I am elected, our people shall be safe and squicky-clean once more!"

Hey, I figure it's almost worth a try. If someone could find the right Mass Media people to bribe for help, I think there's a lot of potential here.

The great enemy of humanity is already anthropomorphised: it is the Death Himself) we do battle with, the Lord of Entropy.

Isn't this basically what the saner strand of occultists do when they personify archetypes and aspects of humanity into minor deities?

The field of AI is already over-saturated with anthropomorphisation

Actually, on this forum Clippymorphisation is rather prevalent.

I'm reminded of The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant...

How's about a bias demon where people who read far too much scifi, via the same biases that on national scale produced the TSA, are overly concerned about things like clippy, creating the concept. Now that's a clippy-creating bias demon.

I worry that this would bias the kind of policy responses we want. I obviously don't have a study or anything, but it seems that the framing of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism have encouraged too much violence. Which sounds like a better way to fight the War on Terror, negotiating in complicated local tribal politics or going in and killing some terrorists? Which is actually a better policy?

I don't know exactly how this would play out in a case where no violence makes sense (like the Cardiovascular Vampire). Maybe increased research as part of a "war effort" would work. But it seems to me that this framing would encourage simple and immediate solutions, which would be a serious drawback.

Religion being the only social structure that is know to be able to endure even a fraction of the time required, it has been proposed that religion is the least worse means to warn distsnt future generations about nuclear waste sites. Not money or architecture or language, but ghost stories.

This was used in an episode of South Park.