I actually think a lot of people who advance the selfishness hypothesis are instead confused about selfishness.
On one hand, the word “selfishness” has a bunch of negative connotations and associations. But on the other hand, the revealed preferences theory holds that, in the end, we do what we do because we in some sense want to. Excepting reflexes and autonomic behavior, this is both trivially true and utterly useless. Saying that we do something “because we want to” has no explanatory power. But people who are confused about this take “we do what we want to”, together with “to do something merely because you want to is selfish” together to say that “all behavior is selfish.” This smuggles in all the connotations of selfishness, without explaining anything.
This post does a good job of explaining why our behavior doesn’t match some of the connotative meanings of selfishness, but doesn’t address the common confusion. That’s probably because you wrote it for the Less Wrong audience, who should already have the tools to avoid the common trap.
I actually think a lot of people who advance the selfishness hypothesis are instead confused about selfishness.
On one hand, the word “selfishness” has a bunch of negative connotations and associations. But on the other hand, the revealed preferences theory holds that, in the end, we do what we do because we in some sense want to. Excepting reflexes and autonomic behavior, this is both trivially true and utterly useless. Saying that we do something “because we want to” has no explanatory power. But people who are confused about this take “we do what we want to”, together with “to do something merely because you want to is selfish” together to say that “all behavior is selfish.” This smuggles in all the connotations of selfishness, without explaining anything.
This post does a good job of explaining why our behavior doesn’t match some of the connotative meanings of selfishness, but doesn’t address the common confusion. That’s probably because you wrote it for the Less Wrong audience, who should already have the tools to avoid the common trap.