I'll just say the preferred mind-state of happiness is the harmony of our innate desire for pleasure and our innate desire for altruism, two desires that often overlap but occasionally compete. Do you agree that altruism deserves exactly the same sort of special recognition as an ultimate motivator that pleasure does? If so, your guess that we might not have disagreed about anything real was right.

I agree that in most cases (sociopaths are an exception) pleasure and doing good for others are both things that determine how happy something makes you. And so in that sense, it doesn't seem that we disagree about anything real.

But you use romantic sounding wording. Ex. "special recognition as an ultimate motivator".

"ultimate motivator"

So they way motivation works is that it's "originally determined" by our genes, and "adjusted/added to" by our experiences. So I agree that altruism is one of our "original/natural motivators". But I wouldn't say that it's an ultimate motivator, because to me that sounds like it implies that there's something final and/or superseding about altruism as a motivator, and I don't think that's true.

"special recognition"

I'm going to say my original thought, and then I'm going to say how I have since decided that it's partially wrong of me.

My original thought is that "there's no such thing as a special motivator". We could be conditioned to want anything. Ie. to be motivated to do anything. The way I see it, the inputs are our genes and our experiences, and the output is the resulting motivation, and I don't see how one output could be more special than another.

But that's just me failing to use the word special as is customary by a good amount of people. One use of the word special would mean that there's something inherently different about it, and it's that use that I argue against above. But another way people use it is just to mean that it's beautiful or something. Ie. even though altruism is an output like any other motivation, humans find that to be beautiful, and I think it's sensible to use the word special to describe that.

This all may sound a lot like nitpicking, and it sort of is, but not really. I actually think there's a decent chance that clarifying what I mean by these words will bring us a lot closer to agreement.

Okay...most people want some vacation, but not full-time vacation, even though full-time vacation would bring us a LOT of pleasure. Doing good for the world is not as efficient at maximizing personal pleasure as going on vacation is.

True, but that wasn't the point I was making. I was just using that as an example. Admittedly, one that isn't always true.

Yay!!!

I'm curious - was this earth shattering or just pretty cool? I got the impression that you thought that humans are completely selfish by nature.

So based on biology and evolution, it seems like a fair assumption that humans naturally put ourselves first, all the time. But is it at all possible for humans to have evolved some small, pure, genuine concern for others (call it altruism/morality/love) that coexists with our innate selfishness?

And that this makes you sad and that you'd be happier if people did indeed have some sort of altruism "built in".

I didn't think of a mother sacrificing herself for her kids like that, but I did think the most selfish, pleasure-driven individuals would quite probably be the most likely to end up in prison so their genes die out and less probably, but still possibly, they could also be the least likely to find spouses and have kids.

I think you may be misunderstanding something about how evolution works. I see that you now understand that we evolve to be "altruistic to our genes", but it's a common and understandable error to instinctively think about society as we know it. In actuality, we've been evolving very slowly over millions of years. Prisons have only existed for, idk, a couple hundred? (I realize you might understand this, but I'm commenting just in case you didn't)

My thoughts on arrogance are a little unconventional.

Not here they're not :) And I think that description was quite eloquent.

I used to be bullied and would be sad/embarrassed if people made fun of me. But at some point I got into a fight, ended it, and had a complete 180 shift of how I think about this. Since then, I've sort of decided that it doesn't make sense at all to be "offended" by anything anyone says about you. What does that even mean? That your feelings are hurt? The way I see it:

a) Someone points out something that is both fixable and wrong with you, in which case you should thank them and change it. And if your feelings get hurt along the way, that's just a cost you have to incur along the path of seeking a more important end (self improvement).

b) Someone points out something about you that is not fixable, or not wrong with you. In that case they're just stupid (or maybe just wrong).

In reality, I'm exaggerating a bit because I understand that it's not reasonable to expect humans to react like this all the time.

It was a paraphrase of this guy's idea and I had used it in the past to explain my deconversion to my friends.

Haha, I see. Well now I'm less impressed by your intellect but more impressed with your honesty!

Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of being very pleasantly surprised to find that other people beat me to all my ideas

Yea, me too. But isn't it really great at the same time though! Like when I first read the Sequences, it just articulated so many things that I thought that I couldn't express. And it also introduced so many new things that I swear I would have arrived at. (And also introduced a bunch of new things that I don't think I would have arrived at)

But if someone is nice to have around, wouldn't he have fewer enemies and be less likely to die than the selfish guys? So he lives to have kids, and the same goes for them? Idk.

Yeah, definitely!