RE: The Mathematical Error of Prevailing Selfishness
September 27, 2021 at 11:16 am
(This post was last modified: September 27, 2021 at 11:22 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Our own wellbeing may be more important than the well being of others in some situations...and especially when considering our desire to pursue others wellbeing. If I found 100k in a buried chest when I was digging a ditch..sure, I could donate it all to charity and be done with it. Or I could use it to pay my bills and produce dividends...those dividends might be larger than the initial charitable act, and not by a little, by a lot.
The same thing plays out with apes and honeycombs. The finder satisfies themselves - incentivizing future finds and ensuring that the finder is well supplied to continue searching - the rest distributed along a fairly simple pattern of kinship. The overall effect of this can't be said to damage the group, even though selfish motivations and their attendant behaviors are replete throughout, in every participant. Some of our ideas of commerce and markets are a more elaborate form of what I think is the same behavior. The idea that selfish interests in competition produce dividends greater than the immediate product of those behaviors. If it's wrong, it's probably not wrong on the numbers. Still, we want bad intentions to somehow reduce to poor decisions, so we look for ways to say that what is bad is also inaccurate.
A person may accurately judge their own wellbeing to be worth more in a given scenario and for any number of reasons - but it's likely that we'd still feel they'd fucked it up in some way.
The same thing plays out with apes and honeycombs. The finder satisfies themselves - incentivizing future finds and ensuring that the finder is well supplied to continue searching - the rest distributed along a fairly simple pattern of kinship. The overall effect of this can't be said to damage the group, even though selfish motivations and their attendant behaviors are replete throughout, in every participant. Some of our ideas of commerce and markets are a more elaborate form of what I think is the same behavior. The idea that selfish interests in competition produce dividends greater than the immediate product of those behaviors. If it's wrong, it's probably not wrong on the numbers. Still, we want bad intentions to somehow reduce to poor decisions, so we look for ways to say that what is bad is also inaccurate.
A person may accurately judge their own wellbeing to be worth more in a given scenario and for any number of reasons - but it's likely that we'd still feel they'd fucked it up in some way.
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