The survival bias

 The survival bias: to make a judgement, a human must first survive, thus judgements that lead to death are wiped out. Making the judgement "death is good for you" leads to death and is thus wiped out: the judgement doesn't survive, only people who didn't judge things so remain. Similarly, many depressing judgements don't survive, as they would lead their possessor to despair and suicide, or at least they aren't acted out and don't become very popular, and someone could estimate the rate of "life success" decreases with the greater adoption of such thoughts. Bad judgements too, as in erronical or inexact, which would make their possessor, even if desiring to live and being optimist, die in blunder, such as "eating poison is good for health" or "man is able to fly without the help of machines", are wiped out or become very impopular and never acted out. Of course, the severity of the consequence of the incorrect judgement must be taken into account. In sum, "wrong" judgements of value and of perception naturally are wiped out due to their consequences or remain in a limbo mix of being impopular and not being acted out.

This is a rich subject, so I'll say more. Religion belongs to that limbo. Their incorrect judgements, such as an afterlife, cannot affect the present life, can only be "observed" in dreams, which idealize what cannot be known – is wishful thinking, and of course they also prohibit suicide as a means of getting to heaven, or else all believers would be gone and we would have no one else to preach about it here today, no way for this collection of judgements to survive, so to speak – thus the survival bias applies to it too. Religion values are actually not popular, they are not acted out to full extent except by clerics of the religion: poverty, chastity, these are not for the common man. These values are depressing and could lead someone who holds them to despair. The cleric or monk is a special initiate with institutional support who receives these values through speech along with many clarifications and a social role to perform. Values such as non harming and not lying, etc, of the "not cheating" type, are more actualizable for the common man and thus more popular.

And what of all this? In society, we must first survive, then secure an effortless survival (by enslaving plants, animals, fellow men, machines), then enjoy life. This is the natural course. And this is so because of the bias. If making more effort to survive was good, soon we would be making so much effort that we wouldn't be able to take it and we would die, so we tend to the other side of the inequality. If, having secured existence, we laboured towards making it miserable, we'd despair (and die), so we tend to the other side of it. This bias is actually very important. There are microsignals of dissatisfaction and satisfaction that guide us towards the correct execution of a task. If we chased dissatisfaction we would die, but our wise body still signals dissatisfaction to us, because if we executed all our tasks incorrectly we would also die. Of course, there is tolerance, but at the extreme "the reward for error is death".