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CCC comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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Of course people can do things that are self-defeating - did I ever suggest otherwise? I never said people are perfect guardians of their own self-interest, I said, and I repeat, that a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
I am getting a little frustrated with people arguing against strawmans of my positions, which has now happened several times on this thread. Am I being unclear?
None of those links suggest that people are worse guardians of their own self-interest than the outsider. In fact, quite the reverse. Take the fertilizer study. The reason that the farmers weren't following the advice of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture was that it was bad advice. To quote:
So the study demonstrates that the farmers were better guardians of their own self-interest than some bureaucrat in Nairobi (no doubt advised by a western NGO). If they had been forced to follow the (no doubt well-meaning) advice, they would have been much worse off. Maybe some would have died. Now, at the same time, they don't know every possible combination, and it turns out that if they changed their farming methodology, they could become more productive. Great! That's how society advances - by persuading people as to what is in their self-interest, not by making someone else their guardian.
Phrased in this way, I think that I agree with you, on average.
In the original context of your statement, however, I had thought that you meant that "a random charity recipient" instead of "a random person".
Now, charity recipients are still people, of course. However, charity recipients are usually people chosen on the basis of poverty; thus, the group of people who are charity recipients tend to be poor.
Now, some people are good guardians of their own long-term self-interest, and some are not. This is correlated with wealth in an unsurprising way (as demonstrated in the marshmallow experiment linked to above); those people who are better guardians of their own long-term self-interest are, on average, more likely to be above a certain minimum level of wealth than those who are not. They are, therefore, less likely to be charity recipients. Therefore, I conclude that people who are in a position to receive benefits from a charity are, on average, worse guardians of their own long-term self-interest than people who are in a position to contribute to a charity.
So. I therefore conclude that a person, on average, will be a better guardian of his own self-interest than a random person of the category (charity recipient); since the selection of people who fall into that category biases the category to those who are poor guardians of their own self-interest. It's not the only factor selected for in that category, but it's significant enough to have a noticeable effect.