Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tosh108 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that we have such a hard time accepting the emotion of altruism both in humans and animals. The author of the articles states: "could just be revenge". Revenge is in many ways more senseless then altruism for evolutionary purposes (unless you directly attack killer whales that threaten you, but one could argue that that's a form of self-defence), but from our ego perspective it feels more intuitive, at least to the author. There are also comments in this thread that reflect this way of thinking.

View on HN

I don't deny that altruism exists, but to me it's just another form of egoism. Nobody can convince me that they have ever done anything for ANY other reason than because of the belief that it will be good for them or that they'll get some sort of kick out of it. Not Mother Theresa, not anyone, ever. Because it's not possible. If you don't put your own interests first, you have nothing to give to others anyway.

Moreover, people who are not egoists freak me out. To me, such people are the ultimate hypocrites and I fell that I can't trust them with anything.

> Nobody can convince me that they have ever done anything for ANY other reason than because of the belief that it will be good for them or that they'll get some sort of kick out of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_on_a_grenade

That's called being an idiot. Your government has brainwashed you into thinking of such acts as noble and courageous. They are not. Acts like this do not deserve admiration or respect. Encouraging this in the name of "patriotism" is beyond despicable.

But to get back to the point, as an individual, the only reason you would do something like this is because you feel better knowing that you have sacrificed your life to save other people's lives. Because, presumably, you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't. So if that's your way of dealing with the situation - that's fine, I guess. I still think you're an egoist for doing it.

I suspect people fall on grenades more to save their friends in the blast zone than some ideal of patriotism. There are cases not involving military/combat as well, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Oates.

You appear to have constructed a weird, intentionally specifically narrow definition of altruism as a strawman. Congratulations on slaying it.

Specifically, one is either an egoist for receiving any type of reward, intrinsic or extrinsic, and regardless of intent, or an idiot otherwise.

If I fall on a grenade, I'm not doing it for my country or some idea of "patriotism". I'm doing it to save my friends.

Your hypothesis (that everything is egoism) is unfalsifiable, and therefore useless.

I think it depends whether you are arguing on a philosophical or on a biological/chemical level. On these low levels we do stuff, because substances in our brain reward us for doing so even if it might hurt ourself in the long run. So I do not believe in true altruism either, which does not mean that people actively have egoistic motives when doing altruistic actions.

What does believing in an emotion mean? Egotism is arguably no more real then altruism. If your "reward in the brain" statement is correct why is that egotism? If that reward system drives a father to kills himself for his child that's not very egotistic. Why in a biological system would the "self" be preferred above the larger picture? This is definitely not argued in evolutionary theory. In the end it's very much connected to our core motives for doing what we do, and surviving is not always on the top of that list.

I don't believe that people do altruistic things, because on a biological level we do stuff, because we like the feeling in our brain, therefore we do it for ourself, which is egotistic.

Truly altruistic would be something we just do without any benefit for ourself. I just argued that this only exists on a philosophical level, not on a biological level, so I don't believe in the concept unless we agree to treat the brain as a blackbox.

So do you believe in free will at all? Or is everything just a deterministic chemical cascade of inputs and outputs, in which case the answer to all this discussion is "mu". [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29

Ah, you got me. Indeed I think so, but I find it nice that the complexity of the universe hides it from us and it only occasionally comes up in discussions like this. Thanks for the interesting link.

> I find it nice that the complexity of the universe hides it from us and it only occasionally comes up in discussions like this.

I agree. I find arguments for lack of free will strange. If we don't have it, then what's the point of anything, including arguing whether we have it? It's not about being right or wrong for me, but rather that I'll always accept the illusion of free will, because anything else is just boring and depressing.

And who knows, maybe in the end we'll discover that there's randomized quantum effects that break the determinism. While not quite free will, at least it's an out from the boring and depressing alternative.

We are tiny unimportant ants on a tiny and unimportant planet floating meaningless through time and space and yet we are alive and are at the same time already distanced so far from the act of surviving. I think there is no point in anything, but consciousness and thoughts are a pretty awesome compensation to me.

I personally believe that quantum effects don't break the determinism, just because I like to. Otherwise there is more space for a god and I am to lazy to invent my own, while I am absolutely certain that the current ideas of him are wrong. I like the idea that there has been something at the beginning much more. Then it can be something simple like "time does not flow linearly" and you are done.

In the end it does not matter whether we will take even more blue pills or somehow get to experience the red pill. Either way it is a hell of a show and not boring at all.

> I just argued that this only exists on a philosophical level

That definition of altruism doesn't even work on a philosophical level, since one can always level an unfalsifiable charge that /some/ part of the brain is perceiving the altruistic action as a reward.

It seems like this point of view is unassailable because for every example that, in regular understanding, would be selfless behaviour, the definition of self-interest is stretched to encompass it.

- Anonymous philanthropy => feelings of self worth

- Low reward public service (Mother Theresa) => fame and influence

- Parents sacrificing personal good for kids => some kind of evolutionary advantage

- Falling on a grenade => Avoiding survivors guilt

I don't mean to present strawman arguments for these scenarios - if they are silly I apologize. In any case, it seems to me that denial of altruism always ends up stretching the definition of selfish and shrinking the definition of selfless, so that any scenario can fit.

Another viewpoint: Did Mother Theresa perform her acts for fame and influence? Or did she receive fame and influence for performing the acts that she would have performed anyway? It just so happens that people like being helped, and will generally feel friendly and helpful to those who help them. Do this enough, and you'll end up with a pretty large sphere of influence, even if that was not ever a goal.

Most of the sacrifices I make for my kids feel like the exact opposite of self-gain. "Do something I want to do" vs "do something the kid would benefit from" is a choice presented to every parent every day.

I don't think that the possibility that the latter might have some indirect self-benefit keeps it from being an act of altruism, for any reasonable definition of altruism. I mean, "some kind of evolutionary advantage" is a plausible explanation for pretty much any behavior by any animal on Earth.

That's easy to answer. Taking care of your children is not aultruism, it's a genetic inevitability. Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future. Your children are the means of doing this. To protect this investment your genes have gifted you with hormones that make you a happy and willing slave to these little bundles of genetic immortality. :-)

This is a cop-out. There is nothing anyone does that couldn't be plausibly cast as an evolutionary imperative. You gave your kid the last bite of your dinner? Obviously you were trying to maximize his chance of surviving and reproducing. You kept the last bite for yourself? Obviously you were nourishing yourself to ensure your ability to provide for your kids in the future. You gave the last bite to the neighbor's kid? You must have been supporting your community because your kids thrive when your tribe thrives. You sent it off to starving children in Africa? Clearly you were trying to cultivate a reputation of charitable giving in order to increase your status in the tribe. This is a parlor game, not a reasonable way to talk about whether whales can display behavior we usually associate only with humans.

> Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future.

Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.

Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.

Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.

I agree. I wonder if a better strategy would be to amend the definition of altruism to include doing something for someone else because it makes you feel good. Surely most would agree that "it makes me feel good to help someone" vs "I financially gained from helping someone" are not the same type of "selfishness" (excluding the genetic reductionist explanations).

This leads to more questions, among them: why does it make me feel good?

Why doesn't it make me feel bored, sleepy, nauseous, repulsed, angry, etc. ?

My problem with this argument is there's an underlying assumption that the end of the day our basic core motive is selfish/egotistic, it might be so but many who use this assumption as a base of their arguments do not bother to prove it because believe that it is so.

Since when did the definition of altruism exclude acts just because they make a person feel good?

There seems to some serious latent Puritanism in this discussion.

That says something about you. But in general a lot of people act self-less in favor of a person they love.

Yea, it says that I'm awesome :)

Come on, how can you possibly call this "self-less"?? If you're doing something for someone you love, it's because you love them. That's the ultimate good-feeling. You're doing it to feel good, period. I hate people who do things like this and then say "I acted selflessly for you". No, you didn't, you moron. You acted as selfish as can be. Now, thank you very much for doing what you did for me, but don't EVER expect me to pay you back in any form, or to thank you, or to even acknowledge what you did, because then there wasn't anything selfless about it, was there?

If you love someone and you've done something for them, good for you. Yay. Move on.

Well - of course there has to be some charge somewhere in your brain build up before you do anything. But your reasoning is essentially just playing with words - b/c of course if you do something for somebody b/c you love them, then you do what you do B/C you love them ... well.

I think a big problem with your concepts about altruism and selflessness is assuming the actor had the choice to act or not act, so by definition if they acted it must be because they wanted to; therefore, its not selfless.

However, life is not usually a choice of act or don't act (help a love one or not). Moreover, when people make selfless decisions, we usually define them as such because the choice is action A or action B (buy a loved one a gift instead of yourself) and action A is objectively more beneficial to the actor (buy oneself a gift) but they still choose action B because the benefits it brings to others and the decision was based on putting others before oneself. In other words by sacrificing act A to do act B, you are right the actor will usually receive some subjective inherent benefit of doing B (it feels good to buy loved ones a gift), but the decision is not made on that basis because A would have made the actor feel even better than B, but the actor made the decision on the basis of putting others needs before their own.

Have you never done something you don't want to do to help someone else?

What's your definition of altruism? I let a guy behind me at the grocery check-out in front. He had one item and I had an entire belt full, and the express lines (for low item counts) were all closed. Why? Because I know that situation sucks, and it's what I would have wanted to happen for myself. Does that make it egoist? I don't know. I never expect to see that person again; I never expect anything to result from that transaction other than my leaving the store a minute later than I could have.

The gp will find some way to construe your actions as selfish because doing selfless things is harder to understand for them than the mental gymnastics of figuring out what you're trying to get from the situation. People who are selfish assholes are usually unable to empathize with people who do selfless things, probably because they're bad at empathizing in general.

GP might possibly be what I've heard referred to as a "transactional" personality -- every interaction is a transaction and the goal is to extract value from the transaction. These are the people you see on caller ID and mutter, "What do they want now?", because they only contact you when they want something. And, of course, people do have a tendency to attribute to others the same motivations as themselves.

gp might claim that you did it so you could talk about it later :)

And we're more likely to talk about the things we're proud of. Just sayin'

You seem to be constructing a definition of altruism that isn't just practically impossible, but /theoretically/ impossible for anyone to meet, since you can always say "Oh, but they're /actually/ doing it for their own benefit!" Such a definition is unfalsifiable (akin to conspiracy theories) and thus not terribly useful.

It's just empathy. I don't help people because it makes me feel good (it usually annoys me), I do it because it would suck to be in their situation.

I think it is easy to come up with examples of people doing purely altruistic things. One simple example would be an atheist that sacrifices himself for his country. He knows there is no reward at the end of the tunnel and may not even particularly want to do it but maybe feels it is his duty for the "greater good". Purely altruistic behavior can be justified by anyone who is fully committed to, say, utilitarianism and I'm sure there are other moral philosophies that can justify it without any consideration for personal reward.

I think you have to distinguish the case between someone doing a kind deed and feeling good versus someone doing a kind deed because they expect to feel good. Feeling good because you did something good is involuntary and for most people unavoidable. It can be a side-effect of the deed, rather than the cause.

I like most people do a lot of things out of habit. Suggesting people need complex motivations for actions completely fails to account for basic human behavior.

This says a whole lot more about you than it does about Mother Teresa or anyone else.

Joey is that you ?

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

I agree that altrustic acts are prompted by the expected emotional reward that is built into us. In that sense, altruism is selfish. I disagree that this idea of "selfish altruism" means that altruism is not to be respected, that it is hypocrisy, or that it is ok to always chase your own self-interest.

The Prisoner's dilemma shows quite clearly that there exist problems where, if every agent chases their own interests exclusively, all agents end up in a sub-optimal state.

The whole concept of civilization is based on the willingness of individuals to abide by rules, but it's important to realize that following the rules does not benefit you. You expect to benefit from the rules because you expect that other people will also follow the rules. But you following or not following them has almost no impact on the willingness of others to comply. In short, it is in everyone's interest that as many people as possible abide by the law, but it is in no individual's interest to abide by the law as long as they can avoid being caught.

Society wouldn't work if a large chunk of the population were completely unable to put the interests of the collective above their own interests. We'd all be committing exactly the amount of crime we think we could get away with, everyone would be untrustworthy and corrupt.

It doesn't matter why people are altruistic, or that their reasons are ultimately selfish. Altruism should be respected, selflessness should be praised as a virtue. Selfishness should never, ever be praised as a virtue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com