taelor comments on Fake Selfishness - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 November 2007 02:31AM

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Comment author: taelor 21 October 2011 06:50:12AM *  0 points [-]

I've always felt that both "selfishness" and "altruism" were results of the Fundamental Attribution Error. Some actions are deemed "selfish" according to society's mean value set, others are deemed "altruistic" or "selfless". Personally, I'm more interested in the chain of events that ultimately lead up to an action being performed and in the chain of events that occurred as a result of it than I am in applying labels of dubious and limited utility to things.