= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lessdazed comments on Not for the Sake of Selfishness Alone - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (20)
Good post, and I agree with your conclusion, but I'd try a different tack to get there - one that's probably the same argument encoded differently.
Instead of talking about "desires for the well-being of others" vs. "self-interested desires", I'd throw out the whole desire language and use the language of behaviorism here. Seeing others in pain is negatively reinforcing. Helping others is positively reinforcing. Therefore we help others.
Instead of the question "what desire is at the root of your helping behavior?" this suggests the question "why is helping others reinforcing?" to which the answer is probably evolutionary and has nothing to do with the character of the person in question.
If you then ask the altruist what desires motivated their action, they'll make something up, the same way people usually make up their reasons for stuff.
Also, am I understanding the experiment table right in saying that when subjects felt high empathy for Elaine, they were more willing to stay when escaping was easy than when it was difficult? Any ideas why that might be?
Stylistically, I would organize the article around the cleverness of the experiments. I'd invite the reader to pause and think of how to test the questions at hand, with hints. This has the benefits of stretching people's minds, making people less prone to arguments from ignorance because it confronts them with the fact they couldn't think of how to test something and thought it impossible, making them feel good when they can think of how to test it, and it might even lead to someone thinking of a novel and superior way to do so.
Then I'd linger on how details of the experiment disambiguates subjects' reasons behind actions. This makes the issue an exercise in problem solving rather than receiving a teacher's password from authority.
It is of course lukeprog's show, and he's doing a great job. His way has its advantages.