Selfishness Is Learned: We tend to be cooperative unless we think too much | Hacker News Reader

Selfishness Is Learned: We tend to be cooperative unless we think too much

nautil.us

128 pointsdnetesn50 comments

There is a need to really consider definitions of selfish/cooperating here and skimming the article, the authors seem to take a narrow, short term focused set of definitions that aren't always applicable to these terms as they can be more broadly defined.

For example, I'm a married man. I am married because I want to share my life experiences with my wife. I want to cooperate with her in building those experiences and navigating through the options. I engage in this deep cooperation and sharing with another person precisely because I am selfish. I give money and sometimes my time to causes like the Red Cross and Institute for Justice, again, not because I'm naturally cooperative, but because I view, over the long term, that these organizations may actually either be helpful to me someday or will help mold the kind of society I want to live in: I'm being cooperative because this sort of cooperation is ultimately in my best interest... in other words, I'm being cooperative precisely because I am being selfish.

I could rob a bank to get cash now, cheat a merchant that gives me too much change, simply be rude to people because it feels good in any one moment, or... as the test in the article states... take from the communal pot without contributing anything. That's the sort of thing the article is calling selfish, but looking at my life as a whole, each one of those things actually aren't all that selfish; they simply satiate in the moment and comes with consequences if one things more clearly about it. Each of those "quick fixes" end up causing me more long term harm than good (always being on the run, making a society where dishonesty is the norm, encouraging everyone to be rude, encouraging less sensible generosity).

So yeah, we may cooperate as a default, we may make short-sighted self-interested decisions with a little thought, but selfish cooperation takes the most thinking.

I too believe there is some meat on the bones of psychological egoism [1], the thought that altruism in its most purest sense doesn't really exist, because there is personal benefit (feeling good) to being altruistic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

Biz Stone talks about selflessness being selfish because altruistic acts release the same chemicals in the brain as winning money, apparently. I help out at a local work group restoring old buildings. It's only a morning a month but it puts a smile on my face for the rest of the day, partly because I enjoy the work but mainly because I am volunteering.

Yeah but I mean that logic works in reverse too. And altruism has a couple million years head start on 'winning money' when it comes to fundamental motivators.

Feeling good about being benevolent is the least transgression for an altruist. I would argue that being fully consistent when it comes to living philosophically altruistic is only possible if you're prepared to die for it (quickly).

Think about it, every time you take a bite of food, you act selfishly. I guarantee you if you look hard enough you will find someone that is more starved than you are when you take that bite.... even if you, yourself are starving. How much more selfless and altruistic can you be than to give all the food you would otherwise eat for the benefit of your fellow man that otherwise would starve? (nevermind what it says about them to accept your sacrifice). How can you not be selfish when you choose to service your own need of nourishment, no matter how little you take, over choosing to feed those others that need it more.

Egoism on the other hand doesn't mean that you don't cooperate. It doesn't mean that you can't be benevolent. True, it doesn't demand any of that from you, but in the long view and all other things being equal, it's usually in your interest to cooperate and to be benevolent.

being fully consistent when it comes to living philosophically altruistic is only possible if you're prepared to die for it (quickly).

Imagine you're the only skilled baker in town. Does your community benefit more from you when you starve yourself to death, or when you keep producing food for them?

I took this specific quote as killing yourself is the most merciful thing you could do for others. Dark indeed.

The arguments that soundly defeat all the pure forms of psychological egoism are available in the criticism section. The guy who lays down in front of the tank isn't being selfish in any reasonable sense of the word, and most attempts to rescue the claim end up trivializing it, by simply calling any goal-oriented behavior "selfish", even when those goals are clearly not for one's own benefit.

There are more defensible forms of psychological egoism, but your summary ("there is personal benefit (feeling good) to being altruistic") doesn't work.

Exactly. Words are reductions of reality and it's very easy to let yourself be lured into a language which makes something that's actually quite complex and fuzzy seem rather simple and defined.

What is selfish and what is altruistic isn't as easily defined. In fact the only way to really clearly determine whether an action is selfish or altruistic would be to understand the intent behind the action.

But of course not even the individual are always aware of why they do what they so that doesn't really help us.

When you define selfishness as you do, it becomes tautological and therefore meaningless. If individuals are atomic and autonomous agents making decisions that maximize whatever it is they value (survival, comfort, pride, ego) and minimizing whatever it is they dislike (pain, guilt, loneliness, cognitive dissonance), then everyone, including the "guy who lays down in front of the tank" that jessriedel mentions, is selfish by definition. [1]

An alternate definition of selfishness: Consider the world as a set of concentric circles centered on an individual. The narrowest encompassing the individual, the next encompassing the people they love most (usually children), the next their greater circle of family or friends, and so on to the largest circle the includes the world. (What appears in any circle and how far from center it appears can vary greatly from person to person. Some include animals, the environment or god(s).) The more one's interests and decisions are concentrated on the inner circles, especially the most inner one, the more selfish one is. An altruistic person would be one where the gradient of interest doesn't peak at the center. This definition is in line with the meaning of "selfishness" as commonly used, its "common sense" definition.

[1] The only way your definition would not be tautological is if individual humans weren't atomic or autonomous agents. It's something to consider. It's certainly possible that we have genes that predispose us to care about or subconsciously act for the benefit of things beyond our individual self, in the same way individual cells in a multicellular organism are preprogrammed to act for the good of the organism. If multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled organisms and cells lost their "selfishness" in the process, it is entirely possible that it can happen to the "cells" that make up larger "organisms" such as a species or an ecosystem.

I'd call that enlightened self-interest. I think one could argue the motivation for cooperation is also enlightened self-interest. As you say, the big difference between selfishness and self-interest seems to be a matter of foresight.

This definition of selfishness (which I agree is the most consistent) was strongly associated with Ayn Rand's [1]. Having grown up in Europe, reading her works was quite a shock.

The only thing I'd add is that in my experience "short-sighted self-interested decisions" are made by people who do not understand externalities, and/or who favour a locally optimal but globally sub-optimal scenario (defectors in the Prisonner's Dilemma). "Socialist" policies like a congestion charge or pollution regulation are thus consistent with individual rights and an individualist philosophy.

[1] see: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html for quotes from her various books.

The problem with your use of "selfish" is that there is nothing forcing human identity to be understood in such a way that the 'self' is only your individual being. Your identity includes a large part of your culture, and your 'self' can include other people in the abstract. It's not black-and-white, nor is it a contradiction. You can be selfish for your tribe or your family, without expecting rewards to your individual being for doing so.

One thing this doesn't consider: how do your choices affect how the world after you die?

To understand and appreciate personal benefit of cooperation requires much more thinking than to understand that cooperation often is not beneficial immediately or in very short term.

>But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught—now, that’s weird.

WHAT? How is that weird? There are a lot of idiots doing all kinds of stupid things. How is paying taxes more stupid than all of the retarded shit people do?

>Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense.

No they are not. If they have studied ANY social animal, "moral" behavior makes sense. It's selfishness of the group, not the individual.

>But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts

Fuck off! Who the fuck are you?

...

OK MATTHEW HUTSON.

>I have a B.S. in cognitive neuroscience from Brown University and an M.S. in science writing from MIT

> Author of 7 laws of magical thinking > I’ve written for Newsweek, Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Scientific American Mind, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, New Scientist, Slate, NewYorker.com, NYMag.com, ScienceMag.org, Aeon, Nautilus, Al Jazeera America, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Psychology Today

You are what is wrong with academia and scientific journalism.

In cognitive neuroscience for robotics when trying to figure out how humans learn you'd find out that children are innately trying to be super helpful to others when they start perceiving other persons as unique beings separate from them.

Do you have more source for that?

Makes sense from a bounded rationality point of view. We want to be as selfish as possible while escaping punishment and social ostracism; this requires modeling whether others will learn of selfishness, what the punishment will be, what the payoff will be, and so on. This is not necessarily quick or easy, so given the asymmetry in payoffs, it is reasonable to default to cooperation unless the additional thinking indicates that this is a safe time to defect.

(Or to put it another way: is it more reproductively fit to occasionally lie? Absolutely. But if you're going to lie, you need to be careful about it. So if someone surprises you with a sudden demand or question and expects an instant response, the safest answer on average will be the truth.)

Which is it: selfishness is "learned", or selfishness is the product of thinking. Could the same article have the headline below?:

"Sharing Is Stupid: We tend to be cooperative when we think too little"

> Which is it: selfishness is "learned", or selfishness is the product of thinking.

Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

The title seems to imply that selfishness is something externally imposed on people, and that they would naturally be cooperative instead. While both could be true, its more about which is more true. (Although I don't think selfishness and cooperation are necessarily opposites either.)

Sharing is risky. Sharing intelligently (with those who have honor) is more often than not rewarding.

I stopped on "tax". What? Paying taxes is "cooperative"?

When you have a choice, yes. Although when taxes are autodeducted from your paycheck you don't have much of a choice but to cooperate, unless you want to quit your job.

Thoreau was famous for his non cooperative "civil disobedience" which entailed not paying taxes. He ended up in jail for it but he achieved his desired effect in the long run.

Gandhi read of Thoreau's tactics and in turn led a movement in India where millions refused to pay the salt tax to the British Empire.

The US did the same by refusing to pay tax to the UK.

"Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all" - Hobbes

I see Hobbes as closer to reality

I don't see where your reply fits in. The article isn't claiming anything that you seem to be in opposition of? It doesn't say what reality is (whose anyway?). It points out mechanisms. With those mechanisms anything is possible, from Hitler to fantasy land.

Example: Describing the laws of physics doesn't give any description of whether you stand in a wasteland or in a paradise. Either one is built upon the same rules. The rules the article mentions don't rule out the worst much-less-than-cooperation outcomes.

maybe this is off topic but all my cs major friends seem a lot more selfish than my non-cs friends. Ie instead of sharing or letting someone borrow something they want the exact cash value. Even if you've shared with them in the past with no strings attached.

Get better friends, maybe? I noticed the same thing among capital-L Libertarians -- down to calculating the exact amount of money needed per pizza slice when buying pizza and sharing among friends. I prefer to hang out in mostly gifting/sharing circles these days ;)

Capital-L Libertarian here, and frankly when it comes to friends I don't care about money, one big happy 'circle of mooching' as my best man labeled it.

However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Consider perhaps you are not good friends with these people.

Those people are irrelevant. They do that even with their closest friends because they all seem to be intent on not getting screwed. I'd rather share and gift extremely liberally, to the best of my abilities, among my circle of friends and even far acquaintances. Are there freeloaders in economic terms? eh, sure, but a lot of that is income dependent as well. But mostly what goes around comes around and a lot is going around -- velocity of gifting is > than velocity of money which is great. But then again I'm a small-l libertarian socialist.

>However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Technically that's not true. In the cases of con men, social engineers, and manipulators "giving free stuff" is a common psychological tactic to gain leverage over others. I.e. the sub prime mortgage scam bubble of 2008.

There seems to be a correlation between being a CS major and being a Libertarian. Or at least being an HN user and being a Libertarian.

How does that work with, e.g., a phone conversation? Do they bill you for their time? And if so, at what rate?

Interesting, sounds like they are just in it for money. Because all of the CS people I know have a serious passion for sharing knowledge and are so excited to tell me about the new project they came up with or algorithm they just learned. They also let me borrow electronics all the time :)

Yeah, neither you nor I are statistically significant sample size, but I am surrounded by extremely generous techies.

I did this with a recent roommate. I loaned him a couple thousand dollars for furniture and such to get situated in the US, and since I use accounting software to keep track of my finances I find it easier to just issue him an invoice at the end of the month for the remaining debt and any additional transactions that I paid for. If I order food and split it, I charge him 50% on said invoice.

Sometimes he tries to say, "Oh, since I got a pizza last week, you can pay for this Chinese food and we're even", and I have to tell them that it's harder to keep a running ledger in my head than to just go through every transaction once at the end of the month and ask, "Is this a 0%, 50%, or 100% expense?"

I have him pay via ACH into my dedicated 'incoming personal payments' checking account.

This system only works if he also issues invoices for communally-consumed things that he paid for.

I use Splitwise for this and it has been the perfect system for me and my roommate the past 6 months. Small things don't always get added in (like sharing some beers here and there), but most stuff does, and most importantly all of the communal items needed for the apartment. Who ever ends up owing at the end of the month just uses Venmo on there and it automatically zeroes everything out.

The concept of cooperation also fits to the tolerance-intolerance debate.

https://www.myind.net/tolerance-intolerance-and-game-theory

I'm not sure that I think that we'll get desirable results if our motivations are "let's get people to do things without thinking them through".

Their initial example is taxes (and tax cheats). This is a good example for my point...

Paying taxes isn't morally righteous. Our government takes some large fraction of those and spends it on killing people. Killing them far away, with little justification (much of it absurd), no transparency or accountability, and what we have found out about all this is that it's all abominable.

If I could figure out how to cheat on my taxes, I would. I'd feel obligated to do so.

Their second example is hardly better, though it seems that way at first glance (and note how all of these seem simple at first glance). A young man saved a woman in a flood. And his gamble paid off. That time. He almost certainly risked much to save her, and those gambles rarely pay off. Much of the time, acting quickly without thinking gets people hurt and killed. Usually many more are hurt or killed than would have been if slow, deliberative thinking had delayed such rescue.

Then it veers into situations, where the agents are all mindless algorithms, and only the programmer/researcher/experimenter gets to decide what "beneficial results" means.

This reduces everyone in such a model to mindless automatons, where only the results of those in charge are considered. Is that what they want to turn us into? Maybe they can find some secret psychological button to make your concerns melt away, so that the only thing worried about are the wants of those who manage to find and poke the button? This should worry people.

> If I could figure out how to cheat on my taxes, I would. I'd feel obligated to do so.

That is silly. It's like punishing a child who eats too much candy by restricting his total caloric intake. He will continue to eat as much candy and simply stop eating regular meals. (Just look at our crumbling transportation infrastructure…)

You have to punish in a manner not fungible with the desired behavior: in this example, take away toys; in the case of taxes, take away votes.

Governments aren't children. Starving a child is horrible no matter what infraction they're guilty of... both because it's a child, and the infractions are minor anyway (eating candy).

A government isn't a child, deserves none of the same considerations. And it's crime is mass murder.

I'm happy to see it starve, I'm obligated to try to starve it.

You entirely missed my point.

Replace "child" with "garden" and "sweets" with "weeds". If you try to starve the weeds taking over your garden by not watering your garden, you'll have only weeds left.

You need to attack the root of the problem, be it literally roots, or by voting warmongers out of office.

I'm ok with not having a government left. It's a murderous government. "Drone bombs on hospitals" murderous.

You can't vote warmongers out of office. There are no such candidates.

Do people still take sociology or psychology research seriously anymore, following the replication scandals?

Psychology != Social Psychology

Psychophysics and psychometrics hold up really, really well to attempts to replicate. There is a great deal of solid settled science in most every field.

Annectodical

1 GET A$

2 FOR A$ THEN ADD ASSERTIVENESS

3 IF ASSERTIVENESS > USEFULNESS OF LIFE: GOTO END

4 GOTO 1

5 END

(-:

Oops, I thought too much.

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