George Price, who tried to prove selflessness doesn’t exist | Hacker News Reader

George Price, who tried to prove selflessness doesn’t exist

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50 pointsSideloader31 comments

He devoted the last few years of his life attempting to prove himself wrong by sharing his property and belongings with the homeless, only to become more depressed when some of them stole from him and he was eventually evicted. No wonder his biography is called The Price of Altruism.

As one of the most important figures in the last forty years of evolutionary theory, he would make an excellent addition to this list of geniuses with bizarre beliefs: http://kruel.co/2014/05/30/highly-intelligent-and-successful...

For me, stories like this symbolize the incredible compartmentalization of the brain - we can think with complete clarity about the focus of our intellectual passions, and still not have a clue about the rest.

While one can develop strange beliefs in fields one knows little about, it does sound like he in particular may have been suffering from Schizophrenia. The inability to function, the depression you describe and (at the risk of courting trouble for criticizing religion) his report of visions and extreme religious convictions are pretty overwhelming indicators.

Mind you, a diagnosis at a distance is obviously tenuous but it's pretty clear his problems we more likely biological than caused by generosity. There are after all hundreds of billionaires who give away vast percentages of their wealth and do not fall into a deathly depression over it.

I don't agree with that, on the compartmentalization of the brain. Some of what we think in one compartment of the brain can work concurrently in another part of the brain, which can cause us to make all sorts of irrational leaps of reasoning that we abstract over and call logic or rationalization.

It's pattern matching, and some people get too carried away with it, because that pattern matching is typically what initially marked them as intelligent by everyone else, and it works, most of the time, except when we have paradoxes, which we just cover up with more symbolic logic, because we'd prefer to explain logic with more logic, than explain it with common sense.

Some people can think with perfect clarity and be seen as crazy by everyone else, just because people seem to want to observe things that way.

I mean, consider how the homeless who stole from this man may think. Many patterns of which to reason with, none of which are purely mathematical or logical.

I mean, on one hand, we use these things we've been taught mark intelligence and cunning, half truths dressed up in eloquent, alluring, and rhetorically deceptive wording, the rhythm and tempo of each sentence.

On the other hand, it's only the correlation between the Harvard 4.0 GPA and being fascinated with the random dreams and images one's mind presents to oneself day to day. You don't have to literally hallucinate in order to become convinced that your hallucinations are real. That's often a problem with language - day to day, we think some of it literally exists, and it doesn't (or we at least can not prove that it does).

I don't know what George Price symbolizes, because I don't pretend to understand him. But it gives me something to think about that is new.

I imagine that if one would thoroughly internalize the belief that we're driven by purely rational, mechanistic forces, diving head-first into irrationality in an attempt to search for (or somehow invent) freedom and meaning, would be the only rational thing to do.

His case is discussed in the BBC documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis, which is very much worth seeing. It's wide-ranging and opinionated in a way that invites criticism, but always fascinating and I think a point of view worth considering, especially for technologists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of...

>I imagine that if one would thoroughly internalize the belief that we're driven by purely rational, mechanistic forces, diving head-first into irrationality in an attempt to search for (or somehow invent) freedom and meaning, would be the only rational thing to do.

Nah. Compatibilist free will is entirely real, and meaning is more-or-less a built-in byproduct of living life. In fact, the most common reason people "lack meaning" is precisely because they're trying to be as "free" as possible by minimizing the attachments that make life meaningful.

Here's a different point of view: isn't it great that selflessness is hardwired into our very being? Of course, our actions are tied to a desired outcome, but we value our legacy above our own physical and mental wellbeing. imho the human race may be selfish, but the individual is prone to express selflessness.

The point is though that we perform selflessness acts because of the way it makes us feel. We aren't truly "selfless". Good deeds are a byproduct of our desire to make ourselves feel better.

You're arguing for psychological egoism. The problem is that, although many acts of apparent selflessness have plausible selfish explanations, there are clearly some that don't. (People laying down in front of tanks, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism#Criticism...

You either need to admit that some acts are selfless, or you end up just defining "what someone selfishly wants" as "what someone chooses to do", which isn't very useful.

>(People laying down in front of tanks, etc.)

There are a couple ways to handle this.

First, humans are not inherently rational. How many times does a human desire one goal but performs something that moves that goal further away from them, perhaps to the extent they destroy any hope of obtaining that goal?

Second, there are social benefits to selflessness that we will tend to be able to enjoy the benefits of but which are not always going to be there.

Consider a bird trained to press a button for food though the food only has a chance of being produced. Even in cases where there isn't food, the bird is still pressing the button to get food. Even when an outside observer knows the next press will not generate food, the bird is still pressing it for food. Even if we could inform the bird that food would not result from the next press, the bird would likely make the decision anyways to disregard our advice and press the button for the sake of food.

There's no such thing as meaningful action without feedback. We could not conceive selfless actions without the attached feelings like blind people do not conceive color. Without the feedback, we would lack the right tools to discern worth doing from worthless. Fortunately, the common good is often perceived as worth doing, because the brain tricks us: behind a selfish action often lies a selfless outcome.

This is the sort of thing that can really only be answered by asking you to clearly specify the alternative you are proposing. You want a world in which... what... being altruistic makes you feel bad? Isn't altruism supposed to be good? Shouldn't doing right things feel right? (I grant this is not always the case, but we're talking normative here... shouldn't good things feel good?)

How crazy would it be to say "I'm going to build an AI that is selfless and altruistic. When it performs an act of altruism, it will be penalized."? That's not going to end well.

Do we want a world in which it doesn't make you feel anything at all, but by sheer force of rationality our apparently-disembodied consciousnesses choose to do good things? Well... presumably they're going to do it because it creates good outcomes, not merely because altruism is somehow intrinsically good in some abstract, unquestionable Platonic sense.

Altruism just doesn't work as its own moral principle somehow abstractly severed from its effects. We desire it precisely because it has good effects. This is not separable from the desirability of altruism... if altruistic behaviors simply had bad effects we would not continue to advocating for them anyhow because altruism was simply its own moral good, we would call those actions evil.

I'd propose that "true selflessness" of the sort that many people seem to propose in this sort of discussion is merely a fuzzy concept that has no possible manifestation in the real world. Clarifying the concept of "true selflessness" clarifies it it right out of existence.

Yea, I don't really get why it bothers people so much that selflessness has evolutionary origins, which in my mind is completely distinct from the (empirically false) claim that there is absolutely no selflessness in the world.

I mean, from a naturalistic viewpoint the options are pretty much "selflessness has a mechanistic explanation" or "selflessness is a random accident of history". I don't see how the latter would make things better. And if you don't like the dichotomy, your real problem is with naturalism not selfishness.

Definitely. I think it's tied up with a sort of naive dualism, where they see themselves as an immaterial spirit connected to a body. They identify more strongly with the "good" bits, and blame the "bad" bits on the material world. That the good bits suddenly are part of the body breaks down the split they've used to pretend they're "better" than they are.

Can someone explain the equation better than the article?

Every time man tries to "disprove" the less desirable characteristics of human nature. They inadvertently end up proving it themselves.

Case in point: man abandons wife and two young daughters to prove to the world that human beings are not selfish.

So, of course everything you do is for a selfish reason. You behave to fulfill behavioral and emotional needs, but its mostly based on emotion; for without that you would just sit and die. Emotions drive all, even "logic" and "reasoning".

But, the issue is not that we act selfishly, for that will always be, as that is how we can be autonomous; selflessness though, facilitates us acting as a group instead. It is pro-social to improve things for others, and so there must naturally be internal mechanisms that drive that behavior, and dopamine is pretty good at getting behavioral responses.

But to say 'selflessness" doesn't exist is like saying there is no sun. Selfless does not mean you get nothing out of it, just that you get little to nothing out of it; or may even end up suffering considerably for it.

Maybe our definition of selfishness/selflessness is skewed, but they both exist.

Isn't the answer to this question to be found in game theory?

According to the article, the second part of Price's efforts was to apply game theory to evolutionary biology.

So probably, the reason why you think the answer is in game theory is because of his original work.

I haven't found much evidence for what I would call selflessness, so I tend not to believe in it.

What I mean by selfish is:

- You do it because you are motivated to do it for yourself. I get an ice cream because I want an ice cream. I study for an exam because I want good grades, not necessarily because I like the studying. I give my SO a back rub because I like to see her smile, or just because I like to give a back rub. I do my friend a favour because I'm afraid he's not gonna like me if I rebuff him.

- Doing things which benefit others can be done for selfish reasons; the distinction is intent, not outcome.

- I could probably fill in other examples but I can't really think (of something) now.

Some might think that I'm a misanthrope for believing that all people are selfish. But no, I'm a misanthrope for different reasons. I don't view being entirely selfish as inherently bad, which I guess some people do. If someone wants to do good by others, or at least not be in the way of others, that desire is not tainted because it is motivated by selfishness.

Maybe my definition of selfish is so broadly applicable that it is quite useless. What good is a word if all things are [that word] and not something else, like an opposite?

Yes, exactly, you're misusing the word by widening its definition unnaturally. Which you're aware of, so the question becomes: why? Who knows, you might find out that the reason could be ascribed to "selfishness" in a much more narrow (and appropriate) way.

> Yes, exactly, you're misusing the word by widening its definition unnaturally.

Unnaturally? As in, unreasonably wide definition by most people's standard?

It seems that there are quite a few people who are hung up on actions having to be selfless when it comes to motivation, rather than just having to do with outcome. And they don't like the idea of actions having selfish motivations: they think that even if you do a lot of good for other people, if you do it because it makes you feel good, then it is tainted by that kind of selfish motivation. It doesn't really "count", and you're not really a good person. Maybe people don't like the idea of selfish motivations. Or maybe they are of what seems to be a majority view, that feelings and motivations are fickle and can change without much rhyme or reason. And in that case, basing your actions on what you feel like doing seems more unpredictable and less controllable rather than basing it on some kind of ethical reasoning + self discipline to live up to some kind of moral integrity inspired by that reasoning.

And I agree with them that it's selfish. But not that it taints the good outcome.

> Which you're aware of, so the question becomes: why? Who knows, you might find out that the reason could be ascribed to "selfishness" in a much more narrow (and appropriate) way.

I don't get what you're saying here.

> unreasonably wide definition by most people's standard?

Yes - words meanings are defined by how people use them, after all.

Let's say you help a friend and you both feel good about it, even though you sacrifice something of personal value in the process. That's a selfless act by most people's definition. Can you truly say that you did it solely for the kick you got out of it, regardless of his feelings about it? No, because you wouldn't feel that good about it if he wouldn't also feel good. On the other hand, if you just did it because you want to trick somebody into believing you care about their good (for example), then that's selfish, yes. Big difference, intention matters.

Looking at it another way, one could construct a symmetrical argument for the nonexistence of selfishness, this time. Something along the lines of: the best possible course of action for ourselves, in the interest of preservation of life on the planet, is to look after our own person and interests. So really we're just being selfless when we're being selfish (Adam Smith: “Individual ambition serves the common good” - mentioned in the article). But this argument equally erases the boundary between the two opposite concepts. And that boundary is what makes words useful as you observed too. Without it our language and our conceptual framework become less rich.

On the other hand I think it's good to observe this collapse of opposites, because it points to the limits of language and description.

> I don't get what you're saying here.

Please ignore that. It was just vacuous conjuncture on my part.

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

RE: Misanthropy I strongly recommend you read Medaka Box and reserve judgment on why I recommend it until you've finished it.

A fantasy manga? I read the plot on Wikipedia; is there anything it leaves out that is vital to understand? A story that humans tell themselves is not usually very good evidence against egoism, but the opposite. We have a deep psychological need to see ourselves as "good".

It was in response to the misanthropy portion of the comment; it's not an argument against egoism at all.

I have definitely seen people do things that make someone else happy, but makes the first person less happy and provides that first person with no benefit.

I'm just one data point on a screen, but is that evidence for what you would call selflessness?

I suppose a cynic would claim that even though the giver is aware of the unhappiness it causes them, material loss, status in the eyes of others etc, the gain is made from "doing the right thing".

A real cynic would say that fighting in WWII was for the glory of dying an heroic death. Posthumous acknowledgement of heroism and honor. But I happen to think many of those who fought in that particular war knew their fate and truly were selfless.

The case I had in mind involved enabling a drug addict to get more drugs. The only gain was that the addict became less unhappy for a time.

Anyway, I propose that given that humans (possibly barring autistics etc) operate by building models of the minds of other people inside their own head, if a person does something based on that model to help the modelled person become more happy, it's a selfless act - I can quite literally create a model of someone else inside my head, calculate how to make them happy based on that model, and then do it. I'm not modelling how I can make myself feel good, or modelling how I'll look like a big man for helping someone; I'm modelling another person's emotions to work out how to make them happy.

I've also seen people do things that offer no benefits to others but makes themselves unhappy. Either the person was acting irrationally or there was some benefit from being unhappy. If the latter, then helping someone else may have been the best way to lower one's own happiness. (As to why someone wants to be less happy, it can get dark fast. Look into why people will cut themselves to see rational reasoning for deliberately harming oneself.)

What if we turned that around? "I don't believe in selfishness"

- You get an ice cream because you've seen other people do it and have watched adverts and want to fit in. You've gotten an image that it's "a thing that people do", eating ice cream. You don't actually even like ice cream. You just don't want to offend anyone who does.

- You help others because helping is a root cause, there's no "because" of some other thing.

- You study, make a career just because, firstly, it's expected of you, by your parents, by your spouse, you can better support your children. Secondly your workplace and society rewards you with money, which is just a token of how much value you have added : in other words, how much you have helped others.

I've read research that found that the more anonymous a good deed became, the less likely people were to do it. I also remember reading research that found that the more guilty a person feels, the more charitable they are in an anonymous setting.

This was all years ago, but in general, there are some ways to test why people are motivated to do something.

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