We Are Built to Be Kind [video]
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"There is literally a compassion deficit that is produced by lots of wealth".
Class warfare material starts at 2:20, in a section titled "Empathy deficits".
It has been my experience that some of the most generous people I've met in my several years of traveling almost full-time have been some of the poorest people. Many homeless folks I've met would happily share anything they had, despite having very little. It's an interesting phenomenon.
pg's essay: http://paulgraham.com/mean.html
Everyone is needy. Everyone always needs help. People have an infinite capacity to suck up your help and they will always need more.
Probably like many programmers, I love producing work for other people that makes them happy. There is nothing that delights me more than watching someone's face light up while using my software and saying "Oh, this is EXACTLY what I need!"
The problem is there are many people out there who will happily take your best work and pay little to nothing for it. I've learned this from bitter personal experience.
A truly selfless person would give their best work away forever for as little as they needed to survive. But this kind of generosity will leave you penniless and the kind of people that use your work for nothing will not thank you for it.
Your employer only pays you because he needs you. If you respond to neediness by giving, you lose your power and your ability to get paid for your work.
To retain wealth requires a kind of dulling of your own innate urge to help others. Because nobody else will stop you from giving and giving and giving until you are an exhausted shell with nothing to show for it.
I'm not saying this is the ideal way to behave, but we have to live in the reality that exists, not an imaginary idealized one.
I don't think I buy the correlation is causation claim you've made between selfishness and wealthy people; or, to flip it, that poor people are poor because they aren't more selfish. There are too many other variables that can explain most poor people being poor; by far, the single best indicator of whether a person will be poor is whether their parents were poor. Many other indicators, education, health, nutrition in childhood, abuse, addictions, etc. follow from the first.
So, I find it hard to swallow your premise that greed makes one wealthy and generosity makes one poor. Certainly there are extremes, and it's entirely possible to give away the entirety of ones wealth and become poor, but I don't know of many examples of that (I've read about some cult members who have given away all of their money to the cult, but not a lot of other examples) or any research indicating it is common.
There was recently an article about meritocracy, which had the same basic takeaway I get from this video: That rich people assume they got there by merit and that they deserve everything they have. And, it discussed the tendency among those at the top to exhibit little desire to help others up, or any sense that they might be ethically obligated to do so.
I went through an Ayn Rand phase when I was a kid, so I can kinda see where this mentality comes from. But, I don't know that it actually maximizes happiness or utility (if one allows "utility" to contain values other than money). And, I also doubt it results in wealth for the majority of people who grow up poor and practice selfishness.
There was a tiny bit of science in there and a whole lot of hyperbole. He didn't say how many wealthy people he studied for lack of empathy, how many did show empathy, or how many poor people he studied for to compare to. Also, his assertion that rich people give less to charity than poor people is provably false. It's a mix of hyperbole, blatantly wrong information, and politically influenced generalizations - all masquerading as science.
The point of my comment was that he mislabeled his video for the purpose of trying to cloak his political views in a shroud of legitimacy and impartiality. Had he called it "Rich people hate you" it would have been more closely related to his message, but people would see it for what it is: his opinion.
Behavioral economics studies have indeed shown this. Subjects who were primed with the concept of money/wealth were less empathetic towards fellow human beings. Anecdotally I've seen this happen all around me. E.g., in a road accident, in Bangalore, two wheelers and auto-rickshaw drivers are the first and only ones who rush to tend the victim. And personally I very much sense that I've gotten less empathetic towards others as I've started earning more.
There is a detailed discussion on this topic in "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
I'm now indifferent to even brutal poverty.
India is a tough place to travel though, that's for sure.
As with all giving, you just do it because it's the right thing to do, and defines how you see yourself.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Rape-fear-keeps-US-...
(I'm playing devil's advocate, and I wish the video provided links to its founding research)
Direct links:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/publications.htm
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/resources/studies
Since the video is a high level overview of several subjects and several studies, there is no one paper that is titled "Rich people are kinda assholes sometimes", but there are many papers on empathy, class, etc. many of which are downloadable for free.
It's interesting also that you need to warn like minded folks to turn their mind firmly off at 2:20 because it directly threatens your opinions with straight forward anatomy and neuroscience. A thoughtful person would welcome an opportunity correct an erroneous viewpoint not wave other people away from opinion changing data.
Which is unfortunate, as I was hoping for a discussion of the science...empathy, reciprocity, and non-familial generosity, are elements of humanity that I find utterly fascinating. It's one of the more challenging and puzzling aspects of evolutionary psychology, and is among the things that make us human.
1. Describes some findings about a natural phenomenon
2. (Usually) attempts to quantify that natural phenomenon in some way
3. Describes the process the researcher took to measure the phenomenon (i.e., the experiment)
4. Details how to reproduce the steps so others can verify the findings
The above was an interesting "food for thought" video in the vein of Ted Talks, but I wouldn't label it science. Can we bring back the term "natural philosophy"?
I think it's interesting that you haven't raised any objections to the science...only that the video is not a peer-reviewed scientific article, even though the peer-reviewed science does exist, and is easily found on the websites linked in the information on the video (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/publications.htm).
The use of the term "natural philosophy" implies you don't believe the research discussed in the video is reproducible or predictive, and is instead merely the musings of pre-scientific thinkers, which is dismissive. Yet, you haven't addressed the science itself, only their methods (seemingly without digging a bit to see that they are, in fact, doing real science).
So, I understand your desire to see real science instead of bogus science masquerading as the real thing. I'm as suspicious as you of most videos I see that claim to understand something really complex (like human behavior). But, if I see that the people making the claims have linked to copious and good research on the subject, I'm happy to watch a layman's introduction to the subject so I can get a bird's eye view, without having to have a deep understanding of the subject matter.
If you have reason to believe there's something wrong with their science, that would also be great to talk about. I'm genuinely not trying to convince anybody of anything, I'm trying to learn and I found this video really interesting and informative about things I don't have a good grasp of.
Yes, I find this quite interesting and a possibly a significant new variation on the way groups maintain coherence by avoiding disruptive information.
In the past I suppose the approach employed to avoid ideas that challenge preconceived notions was an authority figure would simply produce a list of banned books and forbidden topics. Maybe this process is a little deprecated in this era of greater easy access to information.
So this new technique seems to be self imposed and seems to work by marking undesirable ideas with keywords instantly recognizable by the group. In this case apparently either to warn the viewer not to look at the material at all or to stimulate a rage filled attitude to the matter before viewing and thus eliminating any potential impact.
In essence this new process seems to use the web to essentially add metadata to objectionable ideas signaling what attitude to have about them and that viewing the information is to be avoided.
Second, I think that the casual arrow is that lower empathy (at least, neurological empathy) makes it easier to rise in modern organizations, and not because organizations are evil, but because it's more efficient to promote people with less empathy. Why? At the bottom, people with "overactive" empathy responses fight others' battles and cause friction. They raise a stink when an intern is unjustly fired while the rest of the company reacts with, "So what? He was just an intern." At the top, they tend to bring along people who are not always the most competent or congruent with the organization's aims. The organization would rather promote a highly talented but less empathetic person and get just him than promote an equally talented but "sticky" person and have him invite less talented, but loyal, people into its upper ranks. The "empathy deficit" means that a person can be invited into an exclusive club and that he won't invite a bunch of his people just because he likes them. And that's why, all else being equal, the organization would rather promote him.
Typically, the people who do the best in the corporate world are high-empathy people with well-defined boundaries, the folks who can see & predict how others will react and who respect the wishes of people who assert them, but don't believe it is their duty to respect wishes that are not explicitly asserted. Next are low-empathy people with strong boundaries (sociopaths), who often rise very quickly but fall just as quickly when they make a fatal mistake and piss off the wrong person. Folks without well-defined boundaries often find themselves trapped at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy; to use familiar terms, the high-empathy thin-boundaries segment corresponds loosely to the "Losers" segment and the low-empathy thin-boundaries to the "Clueless" segment of the Gervais triangle, although this is only a very rough approximation.
The concept of boundaries is itself culturally dependent. The U.S. probably expects the strongest definition of boundaries of any major modern nation, and the mental-health field here usually explicitly coaches the development of firmer, more well-defined boundaries. Western Europe is close behind. Countries like those in East Asia and particularly Japan often have much more collectivist institutions, where people are expected to harmonize with the whole, and one major coaching point for American businessmen in the far east is how to avoid giving offense accidentally by assuming that someone will speak up when you do something they don't like. Native American culture had very weak conceptions of boundaries, and one very unfortunate result is that when you have a society that has a very strong conception of individual rights and an expectation that people will assert the rights that matter to them, and it meets a society without that expectation, the former society will tend to run roughshod over the other.
(Astute readers will notice that I've written this comment in very objective, general terms. This itself is a mark of a weak conception of boundaries; as your own sense of self gets stronger and you begin to recognize other peoples' unique selves, you realize that the objective perspective is itself a myth, and the only thing we can really speak confidently about is our own unique, personal experience, and language changes accordingly to "In my experience..." or "That's not how I see it..." But many HN readers expect this language and view it as stronger.)