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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any research to back up that claim? In my experience, selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile. Gotta care about other people and be a team player to succeed

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If you are being a team player because that's what's needed for you to succeed personally then isn't being a team player the selfish strategy?

Taken to the extreme: If you do good to feel good, you are selfish. But I don't think it matters to the outside. Let's judge the whole person and not some Freudian ego of him.

I agree with this as a standard for judging others, which is what your post addresses, so I have no disagreement with it.

For your self, though, if you are doing good only to feed your ego, the appetite of your ego is still the driving force, so your morality will be subject to the whims of your ego, which means that you're a fair-weather do-gooder - sure to do bad when your ego demands it.

You are not taking it to the extreme. You are just discovering that "selfishness" is not hard-defined. It is relative, and thus one cannot measure it through different people since each one of them will perceive it differently.

Yes. Being kind and sharing with other people typically leads to a positive outcome for ourselves. Even altruism feels good on the inside--otherwise nobody would do it. The Dalai Lama calls this "wise selfishness"

And Gus Levy, of Goldman Sachs fame, called it long-term greedy.

Big surprise, the ghost train guy would have used a ghost train..

The true manipulator doesn't need the warm glow of altruism to pursue his ambitions. The rich manipulator calculates everything as zero-sum and sees people for their utility to be exploited.

You don't have to be a team player. You just have to pretend to be a team player. Big difference.

It's surprisingly easy to pretend. From my experience, a lot of rich people are surprisingly bad at seeing the difference between fake and genuine... If everyone around you is fake, you get used to it and it becomes the norm. You don't notice what is normal.

The richer someone is, the nicer people will be toward them and the more easily they become offended when someone is not nice. Being offended is not the norm for rich people so it hurts more when it happens.

>selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile

Cultivating relationships to one's own benefit is a form of self-interest. This is about self-interest, not antisocial behavior. You can have one without the other.

Game theory bases that we are all self-interested and that also adds a level of safety in some scenarios. For instance you don't want to tank your team, you want YOUR team to win so you do more because of that self-interest. Cooperation can be part of self-interest in that aspect. Even self interest has a level of moral norms and respect for civil rights because you want that same level of protection.

What happens to niceness? It gets chewed up and eaten. I am a very cooperative person but through my life I have realized niceness/loyalty come at a cost but are hard not to do. If you aren't self-interested in yourself, noone will be.

Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation is a good starting point.

you are right and I believe that's how most people actually feel about moral, it's just that their team is not the whole humanity, only family/close friends or such.

Got to be a cuckoobird- pretending to be a team-player, placing all those eggs, in foreign baskets.

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