That is, before I read Edward Teach’s Sadly, Porn that is outright misanthropic, and still feels pretty accurate whenever I can make any sense of it.
Sounds like I should read the book, which sucks, because the only consistent message in reviews is that it is hard to guess what the author is trying to say.
People also have aesthetic preferences (read: values) that do not have obvious self-interested purpose.
Yep. The extremely cynical explanations can be cool and edgy, but their maps miss large parts of the territory. A world where everyone is a psychopath in denial would have some things similar to our world, but also some things wildly different. Unless you keep adding epicycles until everything can be explained as some kind of 5D chess move, but then the theories lose a lot of predictive power.
(The entire point of claiming that someone is selfish is to make a prediction that in certain types of situation their previously hidden selfishness will manifest in their behavior. But whenever it does not, you add an extra explanation, like “well, even if they no longer need to lie to others, they still keep lying to themselves” and “they have managed to convince themselves of their own goodness so thoroughly that they no longer recognize the right opportunity to stop”… yeah, maybe it is true in some metaphysical sense, but if you can justify such things retroactively, you should also include them in your predictions of future behavior. You can’t predict that people would certainly do a bad thing if they got an opportunity and keep finding excuses whenever they don’t.)
Sounds like I should read the book, which sucks, because the only consistent message in reviews is that it is hard to guess what the author is trying to say.
Yep. The extremely cynical explanations can be cool and edgy, but their maps miss large parts of the territory. A world where everyone is a psychopath in denial would have some things similar to our world, but also some things wildly different. Unless you keep adding epicycles until everything can be explained as some kind of 5D chess move, but then the theories lose a lot of predictive power.
(The entire point of claiming that someone is selfish is to make a prediction that in certain types of situation their previously hidden selfishness will manifest in their behavior. But whenever it does not, you add an extra explanation, like “well, even if they no longer need to lie to others, they still keep lying to themselves” and “they have managed to convince themselves of their own goodness so thoroughly that they no longer recognize the right opportunity to stop”… yeah, maybe it is true in some metaphysical sense, but if you can justify such things retroactively, you should also include them in your predictions of future behavior. You can’t predict that people would certainly do a bad thing if they got an opportunity and keep finding excuses whenever they don’t.)