I think I get it and kind of share a similar belief. Most people are “good,” although I’d use a less morally relative term to describe it: Pro-social. People tend to behave in a way that works well with others. This makes sense if you think about it without getting caught up in all the “humans bad” philosopher stuff. One of our defining features as a species is our ability to work together. We form communities, developed languages to communicate, cultural norms and laws to create agreed upon guides on how we behave towards each other, etc. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we were always stabbing each other in the backs.

At the same time, there are some unfortunate behaviors and phenomenon that emerge out of these dynamics. In group/out group thinking, an unwillingness to change things if it means causing disunity with the community, etc. And while I think most people are good, there are different people with different personalities, and clearly we have at least some psychopaths who are willing to exploit peoples’ natures for their own gain. Also, circumstances can create constraints on how people behave. If you can’t afford to be altruistic, you might end up acting in a selfish way, although even then that’s not always the case.

The fact that you can look out into the world and feel bad about all the people who are getting hurt, even if you aren’t personally affected, should already tell you that there is this “ goodness” to most of humanity. Otherwise a) you wouldn’t care and b) all those bad people would deserve it anyway. So that is the hope that keeps me from full on nihilism. Unfortunately I also think that there are a lot of other factors in place which make it increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to organize enough to survive. Wealth disparities and technological asymmetry allows those handful of psychos to wield a lot of power and it’s getting harder and harder to fight back against that.

So yeah, I don’t think “people are doomed even if most of them have good intentions” is that contradictory of a view to hold.

Occam's razor? Maybe their growth in belief in people's stupidity explains why their belief in human goodness increased. Instead, they just believe people are incompetent rather than willfully bad? Curious what the mechanism for it looking like a titration curve is though.

it correlates with love, so that checks out.