The technology example reminded me of Darcey Riley’s discussion of shattered dichotomies: sometimes people think of things as being either X or Y, and then learn an argument for why this dichotomy doesn’t make sense. As a result, they might reject the dichotomy entirely, keep it but conclude that “everything is X” or “everything is Y”, or acknowledge the argument but find the dichotomy useful regardless.
For instance, back in high school philosophy class, I used to argue that “all people are selfish”. If you’re hurt, and I go to help you, it’s not because I’m altruistic. It’s because the sight of you in pain causes me to feel pain, and I, selfishly, want to relieve my own pain (or I want to avoid the guilt I’d feel for not helping). Similarly, if I give you a gift, it’s not because I’m altruistic; it’s because I selfishly want the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from gift-giving.
In high school, I thought this was a great argument. As an adult, I roll my eyes. It’s not that the argument is wrong, per se; based on the definition of “selfish”, it really is possible to classify all actions as selfish. I just don’t think it’s useful. Our folk concepts of “selfless” and “selfish” might be fuzzy and imprecise (as all concepts are), but they help us navigate a complicated world. When you realize that your friend Mike is selfish, you might decide to hang out with him less, or to avoid doing him favors because you know they won’t be reciprocated. And when you’re deciding whether to give your friend Steve a ride to the airport, you might agree to do it, because you don’t want him to think you’re selfish.
(Though maybe the shattering of this dichotomy can be useful for some people! If someone suffers from scrupulosity, and is wracked with unnecessary guilt that they’ve chosen the selfish option too often, then completely removing the distinction between “selfish” and “selfless” could be exactly what they need.)
Another shattered dichotomy I’ve encountered is the people who argue “A city is just as natural as a pristine forest, because cities were made by humans, and humans are part of nature. A city is just as much a natural structure as a bird’s nest or an anthill.” I neither agree nor disagree with this argument; it’s really just a matter of what you want the concepts to mean. And that, in turn, will depend on what you’re using them for. A lot of people (myself included) find natural landscapes beautiful, but also find industrial complexes ugly. And, while I’ll always probably find refineries ugly on a visceral level, this argument helps me appreciate them as part of the ecosystem of human activity, which I do in fact find beautiful. So in that particular instance, I appreciate the shattering of the dichotomy. But when someone says “pollution in the Shenandoah river isn’t a big deal, because industrial waste is just as natural as fish poop”, then I’m going to object, because they’re relying on the standard inference “natural ⇒ harmless”, and they’re trying to get you to classify pollution as natural so you’ll think of it as harmless as well.
I think the example with selfishness is wrong even on technical grounds. It’s pretty easy to construct examples where people will help even though they’ll suffer from it, and while you can construe weird reasons why even this would be selfish (like insane hyperbolic discounting), Occam’s razor says we should go with the simple explanation, i.e. people actually care about others. Nate’s post about it is good: http://mindingourway.com/the-stamp-collector/
Without really making a point here, I think it’s possible to make the definition of “selfishness” broad enough that really everything (a rational agent does) is selfish.
Like, you can also make the definition of “god” broad enough so that the probability of God existing gets arbitrarily close to 1 (for example, by allowing the gravitational force to be seen as a god). So, if we define “selfishness” as “maximizing your utility function” then every rational agent is selfish by the definition of “rational agent” (the utility function can value other people). Of course, as the text quoted above says, the word then has lost all its usefulness.
I think even an extreme example like: “What about an agent who is forced to do something that decreases their utility by threat of death?” falls under that broad definition because a rational agent will only go along with this if they expect death to be worse under their utility function.
Of course, humans are not really rational agents, so the original question of whether humans are always selfish is a bit harder to answer.
sometimes people think of things as being either X or Y, and then learn an argument for why this dichotomy doesn’t make sense. As a result, they might reject the dichotomy entirely
Dichotomy-removing arguments along the lines of ‘there’s no such thing as X’ or ‘everything is X’ tend to be clever (and illuminating if properly understood) but wrong. What they show is that the thing isn’t what you thought it was, or is commonly thought to be.
Cf free will and determinism—suppose the world were deterministic, then all your decisions were pre-determined, so you don’t have free will. But then we’d have to treat all previous uses of the phrase ‘free will’ as meaningless or false, which is highly inconvenient and not in practice what happens. (Cf you’re saying it’s not useful to say that.) It shows instead that free will means something separate from pre-determination—e.g. the ability to get what you want, or want to want the things you want, or whatever.
There are examples where ‘there’s no such thing as X’ can be found to be true even though X was widely believed to exist—e.g. rain-gods, phlogiston. But it’s more normal to say that X does exist but meant something else all along. E.g. atoms do exist, but can be split (ancient Greek philosophers said they were indivisible by definition.)
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could use words that actually mean what we want them to mean?
In OP, “technology”, is used for distracting things—I’m sure the grandma would not object to grandpa’s hearing aid, but she would object to a newspaper (if anybody still read those).
In your quote, “selfish”, means a lack of empathy (I’m not helping you because I don’t care how you feel), or foresight (I’m not giving you a gift, because I don’t see how that would affect our future relationship).
Also, “natural”, probably means “something that was common 10 thousand years ago”.
On one hand, sure, we have to make use of the words what we have. But on the other hand, it’s not like we’re running out of sounds to use. And you don’t even need new words for some of these.
[Moderator note:] I’ve recently found that your comments pretty reliably ended up in frustrating conversations for both parties (multiple authors and commenters have sent us PMs complaining about their interactions with you), were often downvoted, and often just felt like they were missing the point of the original article.
You are clearly putting a lot of time into commenting on LW, and I think that’s good, but I think right now it would be a lot better if you would comment less often, and try to increase the average quality of the comments you write. I think right now you are taking up a lot of bandwidth on the site, disproportionate to the quality of your contributions.
The technology example reminded me of Darcey Riley’s discussion of shattered dichotomies: sometimes people think of things as being either X or Y, and then learn an argument for why this dichotomy doesn’t make sense. As a result, they might reject the dichotomy entirely, keep it but conclude that “everything is X” or “everything is Y”, or acknowledge the argument but find the dichotomy useful regardless.
I think the example with selfishness is wrong even on technical grounds. It’s pretty easy to construct examples where people will help even though they’ll suffer from it, and while you can construe weird reasons why even this would be selfish (like insane hyperbolic discounting), Occam’s razor says we should go with the simple explanation, i.e. people actually care about others. Nate’s post about it is good: http://mindingourway.com/the-stamp-collector/
Without really making a point here, I think it’s possible to make the definition of “selfishness” broad enough that really everything (a rational agent does) is selfish.
Like, you can also make the definition of “god” broad enough so that the probability of God existing gets arbitrarily close to 1 (for example, by allowing the gravitational force to be seen as a god). So, if we define “selfishness” as “maximizing your utility function” then every rational agent is selfish by the definition of “rational agent” (the utility function can value other people). Of course, as the text quoted above says, the word then has lost all its usefulness.
I think even an extreme example like: “What about an agent who is forced to do something that decreases their utility by threat of death?” falls under that broad definition because a rational agent will only go along with this if they expect death to be worse under their utility function.
Of course, humans are not really rational agents, so the original question of whether humans are always selfish is a bit harder to answer.
This reminds me of the Fallacy of Gray.
Dichotomy-removing arguments along the lines of ‘there’s no such thing as X’ or ‘everything is X’ tend to be clever (and illuminating if properly understood) but wrong. What they show is that the thing isn’t what you thought it was, or is commonly thought to be.
Cf free will and determinism—suppose the world were deterministic, then all your decisions were pre-determined, so you don’t have free will. But then we’d have to treat all previous uses of the phrase ‘free will’ as meaningless or false, which is highly inconvenient and not in practice what happens. (Cf you’re saying it’s not useful to say that.) It shows instead that free will means something separate from pre-determination—e.g. the ability to get what you want, or want to want the things you want, or whatever.
There are examples where ‘there’s no such thing as X’ can be found to be true even though X was widely believed to exist—e.g. rain-gods, phlogiston. But it’s more normal to say that X does exist but meant something else all along. E.g. atoms do exist, but can be split (ancient Greek philosophers said they were indivisible by definition.)
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could use words that actually mean what we want them to mean?
In OP, “technology”, is used for distracting things—I’m sure the grandma would not object to grandpa’s hearing aid, but she would object to a newspaper (if anybody still read those).
In your quote, “selfish”, means a lack of empathy (I’m not helping you because I don’t care how you feel), or foresight (I’m not giving you a gift, because I don’t see how that would affect our future relationship).
Also, “natural”, probably means “something that was common 10 thousand years ago”.
On one hand, sure, we have to make use of the words what we have. But on the other hand, it’s not like we’re running out of sounds to use. And you don’t even need new words for some of these.
[Moderator note:] I’ve recently found that your comments pretty reliably ended up in frustrating conversations for both parties (multiple authors and commenters have sent us PMs complaining about their interactions with you), were often downvoted, and often just felt like they were missing the point of the original article.
You are clearly putting a lot of time into commenting on LW, and I think that’s good, but I think right now it would be a lot better if you would comment less often, and try to increase the average quality of the comments you write. I think right now you are taking up a lot of bandwidth on the site, disproportionate to the quality of your contributions.