Tyrrell_McAllister comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong

82 Post author: Alicorn 05 January 2010 09:32PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (183)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 07 January 2010 02:22:39AM 4 points [-]

So niceness has individual hedonic benefits but results in fewer offspring?

That seems plausible to me. I find it easy to imagine that being nicer than the reproductive optimum could make one happier, even in the ancestral environment. Of course, there are stupid ways to be nice that wouldn't make one happier. And I'm sure that one can be too nice. But why would we expect that the hedonic and reproductive optima were ever the same?