Hacker News Reader

Comment by jake-coworker | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an artifact of any large organization of people.

Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances

Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.

We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard

View on HN

> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them.

I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.

On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.

Human behavior is much more complex.

For sake of not derailing the discussion, I think the more appropriate reading would be "people act in what they believe to be self-interest", however flawed the notion of the benefit

Now you have weakened the generalization to the point it's meaningless.

What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?

Belief is categorically not rooted in reality. That's why it's called belief and not fact.

Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy.

You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.

> Humans are intrinsically irrational

Yes

> That is a plain and simple fact

You've not examined the cognitive resources required to properly locate "fact" when humans have other interests, like staying alive and providing for their families. The mechanism seems to encourage directional stances rather than comprehensive ones.

* I wave some sort of unreal RFC 2119 wand at you *

Also, pure rationality is sort of an empty idea - without goals or preferences, it's not really possible to reason your way into deciding an action - just understanding the various likely consequencies of various courses of action. Without that hunger in your belly, your reason has nothing to recommend.

If you want an example, I guess the enthymeme would be:

a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest

b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc.

c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety

I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.

The generalization only works if it's weak enough to be meaningless. Thus, the generalization is bad. Examples don't make it useful.

"People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article.

> I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people

The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.

I didn't propose it, just clarified what I believe to be their point.

I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.

[delayed]

Smokers don’t seem to be under any illusions about whether it’s bad for them? When people have conflicting desires, I think what even counts as “self-interest” gets complicated. Often people are acting at cross-purposes to some of their desires.

I suppose the 'self-interest' of desiring a cigarette outweighs the 'self-interest' of preserving your health.

Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc...

Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.

aka discounting time value, or something like that. "the feeling i will get now by smoking this cigarette, though fleeting, is worth to me now than the chance of years more living, or a healthier late life, if i do not smoke it".

Yeah self-interest occurs across different time scales and consists of a mixture of logical and emotional factors.

It’s also subjective and dependent on the persons values, beliefs, etc.

"I want another drink now. Hangover is tomorrow-me's problem"

One certainly doesn't smoke imagining it's for the benefit of others - if anything it's the selfishness of now against the benefit of future me.

This thread is starting to remind me of Stalker.

Also a little bit of Stanislaw Lem, I remember in one of his books he mentions a service that matches people who want to die with people who want to kill ;)

Self-interest includes chemical dependence and emotional satisfaction.

The broader point is that self-interest is not purely logical because humans are not purely logical beings.

Sure, but then the interesting question becomes how people decide whether or not an action is in their self-interest.

Humans are terrible at doing what's best for them. They are pretty good at following local gradients, though. Smoking might kill you in 30 years, but right now it lets you fit in with the cool kids, or feels good once you're hooked. Not brushing your teeth might be terrible for them and your gums, eventually, but right now it saves you from having to do something.

At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.

One reasoning flaw I've seen in this type of discussion is the assumption that the person has the same value system as you / the experts. In your example, it is assumed that the subject values a very long life. Maybe they don't, maybe they value smoking way more than a long life.

I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".

Smoking is typically a bad example, IMO, because it really takes a lot to actually kill you^. Like 50 years, usually (even 30, in your example, is on the low side). Further, there really are no visible downsides among smokers in their first 10 years or so. Meanwhile lots of other bad habits - hard drugs, alcohol, over-eating, even just sloppiness or laziness - often have real, visible, negative effects pretty quickly.

^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers

I'd like to think humans perform more selfless than selfish acts, but their impact is not evenly balanced. Per act, it is far easier to harm than to help. In a day, if ten people do you a kindness like holding a door open for you and an eleventh spits in your face, you'll be thinking about and telling your acquaintances about the eleventh.

Not all humans act in their long-term self interest, but those that do will be disproportionately represented in positions that allow themselves to enrich their long-term self interest. The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves.

"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...

Reminds me of the poem / song “All I wanna do”

"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Says the man next to me out of nowhere It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy And he's plain ugly to me And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant car wash The good people of the world Are washing their cars on their lunch break Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits

> The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves.

These are regularly rich and at upper echelons of politics.

Having actual ethical limitations is what limits enrichment and gain of power. And while most gamblers loose, some win big and then gain power.

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives

This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.

The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.

It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do, because of course what he wants is best for everyone. He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all. Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things and in all the same ways as he himself does.

So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill.

If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?

> It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do […]

There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves.

For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care; instead many people prevent themselves from getting better health care because if they did that would mean other people (and specifically the 'wrong kind' of other people) would also get it:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over. They are actively harming themselves out of spite.

>There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves.

This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want. It's a really simply concept, but you're probably incapable of conceiving of it. Other people in the world around you are props that the universe invented so the world could be as you envision it.

>For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care;

I don't want "better access to health care". I know what you mean by that phrase, but I do not want this. My brain doesn't work like yours, I do not have the same preferences or desires that you do. I am not "voting against my interests", it's just that my interests are alien to you. I understand your preferences quite well (to a degree, at least) and I acknowledge that those are different than my own. You, though, can't acknowledge the same of me... the best you can come up with is that I'm somehow mistaken, confused, or brainwashed. Even this comment is likely incomprehensible.

>So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over.

My family wouldn't be better off from this... we're not cattle for the farmer to provide health care for. It is not harming me or mine, we're up to the challenge.

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

> This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want.

I'm not ignoring it. I do know it (in certain cases) because they've said so: they want to see certain people(s) suffering:

* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...

They often don't want to suffer themselves and are indignant when things come back and bite them in the ass:

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Leopards_Eating_People%27s_Fa...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkeys_voting_for_Christmas

Though some don't care how much it costs them as long as it costs someone else more (or perceived as such by them):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

But someone's interests/desires of what they believe to be good, and what is actually good can be two different things. (And even if choosing between things that are actually good, one can choose a good that is not as good as what one could choose.)

The core problem is a difference in values. You value your own health over causing people you dislike to suffer. They value causing people they dislike to suffer over their own health. Which choice is "better" is subjective. I'd say that deliberately increasing the suffering of others is bad, especially if it increases the total amount of suffering in the world, but that too is a subjective value judgement.

> I'd say that deliberately increasing the suffering of others is bad, especially if it increases the total amount of suffering in the world, but that too is a subjective value judgement.

Invoking Godwin's law: what the Nazis did was not objectively "bad", but simply something you do not agree with.

To a conservative, yep! Conservative morality is inherently relativist, those who do not share their world view deserve punishment, and our suffering makes the world better.

> Conservative morality is inherently relativist […]

What? Left-leaning folks are stereotypically more secular and less likely to believe in the supernatural, so as materialists would have less of a foundation for any kind of "objective" morality.

A core idea of the conservative state is that there are some chosen people, whether due to their might, wealth, ethnicity, a "god", or something similar, and that the state should protect & serve the chosen people. Those who are not the chosen are bad, and should be exploited to serve the chosen.

It's funny, because you're essentially doing the exact same thing you're accusing the person you're talking about of doing: declaring the person an idiot incapable of recognising other people have different priorities.

Sorry, but sometimes people really do just vote against there own interests because they've been convinced of things that are wrong, or they misunderstand something. I expect you could even think of some examples if you tried.

And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions about someone you don't know: - "thinks of others as robots..." - "Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things" - "He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all" - "this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning" - "...it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned" - "How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe" -

Perhaps you could have some faith? I doubt you've never voted for something you came to regret.

>It's funny, because you're essentially doing the exact same thing you're accusing the person you're talking about of doing: declaring the person an idiot incapable of recognising other people have different priorities.

Incorrect. I do recognize their differences of preference. They do not want the same thing as me. The reverse isn't true. I do not think they're idiots because they want different things than me... you've mischaracterized what I've said. They are idiots because, they (and you) can't recognize that I want something different than what they (and you) want.

And, in your convoluted way of thinking, you can't even get the argument right. You stoop to accusing me of misunderstanding.

>And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions

What exactly is wild about it? You didn't hear me screaming this, mouth frothing, as 6 cops try to drag me to the ground from where I'd perched up on some platform with a bullhorn. No violence occurred. Nothing uncivilized, just carefully chosen words. My "assumptions" if they can even be called that at all, required decades to form. Nothing wild about that. Really, they were boring words, maybe even timid. I'd be wrong and I would know it if you hadn't even chosen to respond. But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?

>Perhaps you could have some faith? I

I would like that. I would want to have faith so very much. It's all I've ever wanted, even before I knew to articulate it as that. Why does everyone make that so impossible though?

"What exactly is wild about it? You didn't hear me screaming this, mouth frothing, as 6 cops try to drag me to the ground from where I'd perched up on some platform with a bullhorn. No violence occurred. Nothing uncivilized, just carefully chosen words" Are you being deliberately obtuse?

"But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?" You think you're so damn clever don't you?

Every time I comment on any form of social media, I remember why I usually don't. Good day.

"We do not trust because we have to or because we have a guarantee, we trust because we choose to, knowing the alternatives might be safer but would rule out things we long for: connection, community, vulnerability, and magic."

Kind of like someone being all about Free Speech, but when they are in power, then anybody that disagrees should be charged with treason.

The point is, that the 'Right' are living in a bubble of cognitive dissonance, fantasy, simulacrum. Barely able to put one foot in front of the other as far as logic goes...

Literally the same group that were convinced by rich land owners that the having a Civil War for the land owners benefit, was a good idea. Going against their own self interest.

My friend, we all live in bubbles of our algorithms. There are only the people who are aware of it and those who believe it's just the "other side."

Sure.

Bush, Obama, Biden. All the same, can't really tell the difference.

This time, it is different. Accepting a Jumbo Jet bribe? with no questions? Manipulating Oil Markets with a war? Having the IRS setup a 1.7 billion fund to pay off friends from a coup attempt?

This is the end.

There are people who still believe the Hunter Biden laptop was fake.

The bubble is not a one side issue.

Guess so, since I literally can't tell what side you are talking about.

More false equivalences. Oh no, Hunter Biden had some Porn. That totally justifies going to war to distract from Epstein, and just as a bonus, its ok to make money on manipulating oil markets and make that mooola.

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives

To the extent this is true, that is only because they believe those candidates will make their lives better. People often declare how their outgroup "votes against their own interests", and use it as some kind of indictment of those people's intelligence. But that is nothing more than a failure to understand people. Essentially nobody is out there voting for someone whom they believe will make their lives worse m

There are people voting to make their lives worse, as long as "other's lives" will be made even more worse as a result.

Spoken like someone who has done zero canvassing or organizing of any kind. You ask two voters on both sides of the spectrum and they'll make the same argument you are.

Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.

> Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy.

The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...]

Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...".

But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".

And most of those boil down to “voting for X decreases the things I care about increases the things I don’t care about; therefore those who care about those things are voting insane.”

It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.

Voting "insane" is very different from voting "selfish".

Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc).

But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all.

It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).

In a republic, where you vote for people to represent you, not to implement your wishes, voting for a candidate you believe will make "good" decisions (even if you disagree with some of them), is actually how the system was supposed to behave. "Good" might mean "the things I want / agree with", but it might also mean "benefits the public interest, even if I don't want / disagree with it".

What do you consider "representing me" to mean?

And sure, people may vote for a candidate (implicitly, for a policy) that benefits society as a whole even if it negatively impacts them. It does stretch credibility, however, to try to make the case this is what is happening when people earning median incomes or below vote for candidates who cut taxes on the wealthiest in a society, as well as reducing the share of GDP going to labor, and claiming "well, those folks just think this candidate is doing a good job on <cultural issue>". I'm not suggesting it is impossible that this happens sometimes, but across the entirety of working class Republican voters (for example) ... I find it hard to believe.

I guess we can see how subtle a skill good messaging is - one can so easily come across as a moralistic busy body if one doesn't listen and connect before trying to persuade.

The suggestion wasn't overt, it was kind of implicity - telling people that they don't know their own self interest, even when they manifestly don't, is not very ahh "politic" :)

It takes a special kind of mind to emphasize the importance of listening while simultaneously disregarding what someone actually says.

People are driven by dopamine. Promotions lead to dopamine. So does gambling. Cigarettes. Sex with hookers. Locking down your series A. Hearing the engine go vrooom. Voting for the guy that loudly says "fuck you" to the other guy. All this is perfectly congruent.

Most of these are either things they believe wont affect them or will affect them in the future. This is not a common behavior for things that will affect them immediately amd I have yet to see someone pass on a promotion because they thought someone else was better

I think you complexity can be capture by defining what people think is best for them. Gamblers often consider there gambling equal to investing. Smoking makes people feel good in the short term, exercise is hard and painful in the short term.

There certainly people who are selfless but in the distribution of personalities selfless feels more rare. And their is always a question to what extent. I think what Hannah Arendt really is getting at is that is possible to build a system that reinforces small compromises for reasonable benefit that leads the system to meltdown when everyone starts making small compromises

We live immersed in an industrial society that highly values productivity and individualism. All we can say is that large organizations of people in these circumstances are observed to default to doing what's best for them, maybe because that's what they were raised to think.

Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.

That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.

This is the default capitalist view. Anthropology disagrees. For much of human history we’ve exhibited altruistic behaviour towards one another. There are plenty of instances of that today: coalitions, unions, mutual aid groups, community volunteer groups… not to mention the individual choices people make in the interests of others over their own.

There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.

>Anthropology disagrees.

Survivorship Bias.

Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.

Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.

Anthropology also shows widespread cannibalism.

I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.

Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.

Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.

This comment is born out of a superficial understanding of anthropology, altruism and selfishness.

Most of the coalitions you mentioned are, ultimately, born out of the realization that, sometimes, you have to give a little now, to gain more later. Even charity at its pure idealistic form requires the altruistic individual to feel they made the world better in their own view (psychic profit, thus ultimately selfish) to happen.

This isn't the "default capitalist view", this is praxeology, plain and simple.

LLM POST!

Nope, this is 100% human-written.

Darn, you sound like one.

A Master of Laws? We should be so lucky! /s

Why people in the past cared for old, sick and disabled?

Multiple possible reasons:

1. Social pressures. Failing to care for others can result in social stigma, with increasing levels of alienation depending of culture/society; 2. Setting examples for reciprocity . One can help others today to set the expection to receive support later. All become old, sick and/or disabled at some point (if they don't die beforehand, immortals notwithstanding); 3. Friends and relatives are valuable in multiple ways; 4. Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.

These are the examples I can state on top of my head. They all require each individual's evaluation scales to favor such motivations.

> 1. Social pressures

How these social pressures could arise if all people in society acts out of selfishness?

> 2. Setting examples for reciprocity

What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?

> Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.

Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!

> How these social pressures could arise if all people in society acts out of selfishness?

Possibly due to point 2, for instance.

> What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?

You do realize that people may become disabled in their lives, right? It's not just children.

In any case, that can also be explained by point 3.

> Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!

But it isn't, and that's the point. This is a case of self-actualization, the highest expression of the "self". Some may argue that this is "selflessness", but I argue that this is "selfishness" in its purest form: the pursuance of one's highly personal goal, i.e. psychic profit seeking.

Also, I just noticed you said "often". But I don't think point 4 is that common. That is, the goal of helping others isn't that high in most people' personal preferences scales, specially in comparison to the other points.

Human capacity for empathy is an evolutionary advantage. When we take care of old or sick individuals (resource permitting) we keep their knowledge base in the group. We also can expect that others will take care of us, which give us more incentive to care for others and strengthen the community itself.

Eventually we benefit from it in our old age and teach our grandkids to remember about it as they get older.

The large organization also breeds more selfish behavior. When you see clear misbehavior near you, and you know reporting it will achieve nothign but get you in trouble, then it's difficult to behave well yourself. Eventually the large organization is just layers upon layers of misaligned incentives. The same complaints people correctly made about the soviet system also applied to the Japanese zaibatsus and the modern US conglomerate. It eventually shows us that the modern product enshittification isn't really a matter of a company maximizing its long term profits, but some middle manager pissing the company reputation away to meet some badly aligned KPI that hands them an extra bonus. And the only time execs are better off intervening is when the product line is already on the brink of being destroyed by competitors. It's principal agent problems all the way down.

From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.

I’ve built a career specifically not joining organizations that do evil (by my definition). It’s a privilege, I suppose.

But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.

That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com