So, first of all, none of that indicates even slightly that "altruism" ever meant anything like "reversed survival instinct". (Which, to me, implies an outright preference for death.)
Secondly, it is not necessarily right to assume that Comte intended "altruism" to mean "the entirety of what Positivism says people should think, feel and do". It looks to me, from an admittedly cursory look at his book, as if he took "egoism" to mean "acting for oneself" or "caring about oneself" and "altruism" to mean "acting for others" or "caring about others", and the key moral content of his quasi-religion was: "altruism should totally dominate over egoism". If I'm right, this dominance is part of Positivism but not part of what he meant by "altruism", and any action or attitude based on caring about others is "altruistic" in his sense even if the person involved cares a lot about himself too.
Assuming his summaries are accurate and his quotes are selected charitably,
Those don't seem to me like safe assumptions.
Altruism, for Comte, was the absolute duty of humans to subordinate all personal interests (other than eating and other rudimentary necessities of physical survival) to the interests of others, and ultimately to "humanity" as a whole.
No, I don't think it was. I do think Comte believed in something like that duty (though I think Smith is overstating it a little) but it doesn't seem to me that that duty was what he meant by "altruism".
Comte's doctrine of altruism, according to which we should "live for others" exclusively
That isn't (in my reading, at least) Comte's meaning of "altruism", merely one of his doctrines about altruism. And, further, I think "exclusively" is an exaggeration: see the passage I quoted above, which seems to me to be saying that although the welfare of humanity as a whole is the One True Ultimate Goal it's necessary and proper for people to care about themselves because if they don't they'll end up being no use to the rest of humanity.
To summarize my position:
and it seems to me that even Comte's meaning is actually pretty close to what "altruism" usually means today, even though he believed things about it that few other people do.
[EDITED to fix formatting]
the meaning of "altruism" in ordinary English, aside from technical discussions of Comte's writings, never seems to have been much like "living for others and not caring at all about oneself"
I disagree. Altruism is almost always put in opposition to egoism. If you care about your family because you love them, and put their needs above the needs of others, that's less altruistic than putting the needs of another family over the needs of your own.
I think Rand is correct on the current usage. One is altruistic to the extent that one sa...
Diana Hsieh interviews Dr. Doug McGuff about avoidable injuries and deaths.
He's an emergency room physician in South Carolina, so he's pretty much just talking about what he's seen-- different regions have different characteristic injuries.
He says that you're safest in the largest car you can afford, which raises some interesting ethical issues.
There's a fair amount about the risks of getting overfocused on getting something done. This adds tremendously to the hazards of using ladders.
Also, did you know trees can go sproing? One of hazards of chainsaws is that a good bit of energy might be stored in a twisted tree trunk. Don't just know your physics, apply it!
More generally, there are machines and situations (ATVs, chainsaws, airplanes, skiing, etc.) which tend to make people feel more competent than they are.
On the other hand, injuries from rock climbing and horseback riding are less common than you might think. I don't know why the ancestral environment didn't give people a reflexive distaste against diving into water. Perhaps people back then had too much sense to dive much.
One of the pieces of advice-- to get out of stressful relationships-- is too general. This is mostly a good idea, but from what I've read, leaving a violent relationship can lead to more risk of violence. It's still a good idea to leave, but it's important to leave cautiously.
Both McGuff and Hsieh are objectivists, so some of the discussion might be in mind-killer territory.
Edited to add: It's possible that objectivism would be better discussed under a new post. It's certain that there's a bunch of interesting material in the podcast, and avoidable accidents are worth discussing.
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