Punchline now redacted :-).

[EDITED to remove some details that I put in to help TheOtherDave tell whether we're talking about the same thing. We were. It's in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas". Details removed lest they spoil it for others.]

A few random extracts (i.e., bits that I happen to remember from the transcript) that may help determine whether this is what you had in mind: "I like to understand up without seventeen clams"; "What are arms? That information is classified." "That's nice. What else do you like to call 'GEB', Doug?"

Altruism is almost always put in opposition to egoism.

If you think that contradicts what I was saying, then I fear you have misunderstood my point. Altruism is (according to what I think was Comte's usage) the opposite of egoism in the same way as loving is the opposite of hating: they point in opposite directions but the same person can do both -- even, in unusual cases, both at once.

A single action will rarely be both altruistic and egoistic, just as a single action is rarely both loving and hating. But "altruism" doesn't mean "never thinking about your own interests" any more than "loving" means "never hating anyone". A typical person will be altruistic sometimes and egoistic sometimes; a typical person will sometimes be moved by love and sometimes by hate.

But you are praised [...] and condemned [...]

There are probably people who hold that everyone should be as completely altruistic and non-egoistic as possible. Perhaps Auguste Comte was one of them. That's an entirely separate question from whether "altruism" implies the total absence of egoism; still more is it separate from whether "altruism" means anything like "reversed survival instinct", which you might recall is the claim I was originally arguing against and which no one seems at all inclined to defend so far.

It's not how much happiness you produce in others, it's how much happiness it costs you that matters.

There may be people who believe that, but it certainly isn't part of the meaning of "altruism". And the example you give doesn't support that very strong claim. If you do something with the purpose of making millions happier and not out of considering your own welfare then (at least in my book) that is an altruistic action whether it happens to help you or harm you. If people are reluctant to apply the term "altruistic" to actions that benefit the agent, I suggest that's just because it's hard to be sure something was done for the sake of others when self-interest is a credible alternative explanation.

Oooops. Absolutely right, of course. Now fixed.

According to Wolfram Alpha if you're a 30yo male in the US then your probability of reaching 65 is somewhere around 80%.

The other demographic details surely make some difference, but I wouldn't assume they're all favourable; for instance, being largely sedentary brings all kinds of problems.

[EDIT: I wrote 20% where I meant 80%. Thanks to wedrifid for catching my mistake!]

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:

• even taking Smith's not-necessarily-quite-fair summary of Comte at face value and assuming that Comte meant "altruism" to encompass everything he taught about "living for others", that still doesn't make the meaning anything like "reversed survival instinct"
• Smith's not-necessarily-quite-fair summary is not necessarily quite fair, and Comte's position wasn't quite as extreme as Smith would have us believe
• Comte didn't intend "altruism" to be another word for "how Positivism says we ought to live", but to be one of two kinds of motivation (egoism, caring for oneself; altruism, caring for others) about which Positivism then made a further claim (altruism should dominate over egoism)
• 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" (never mind "reversed survival instinct")

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 original definition of altruism (approximately: reversed survival instinct), which most people don't even know today

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (which is generally very trustworthy on such things),

• the oldest meaning of the English word altruism is "disinterested or selfless concern for the well-being of others, esp. as a principle of action" (which seems to me to be more or less the standard meaning today);
• the word is derived from French altruisme, coined by Auguste Comte in his "Positivist Catechism" (and the OED has a citation for the English word from the same year as that work was published).

In that work, Comte says of positivism "It is by its nature thoroughly altruistic, or unselfish" which seems to indicate that he takes altruism to mean something like "being concerned directly for others rather than only or primarily for oneself" -- which is pretty much the standard present-day meaning.

Here's a longer quotation from the same work of Comte; it doesn't happen to use the word "altruism" but seems to me to make it clear that he isn't calling for the abandonment of self-interest, never mind its outright reversal:

Only remark that unity in the altruistic sense does not, as the egoistic unity does, require the entire sacrifice to itself of the inclinations which are contrary to it in principle. All it asks is, that they shall be wisely subordinate to the predominant affection. When it condenses the whole of sound morality in its law of Live for others, Positivism allows and consecrates the constant satisfaction of our several personal instincts. It considers such satisfaction indispensable to our natural existence, which is and always must be the foundation for all our higher attributes.

On what basis do you say that the original definition of altruism is "approximately: reversed survival instinct"?

I thought (though I don't now remember where I heard it or how trustworthy the source) that although being higher up tends to make you feel safer it actually tends to make you less safe because the vehicle is more likely to end up rolling over. Is there any actual benefit to higher CoG?

(You can have higher passengers without higher CoG, which is probably good -- but then you need a load of extra mass at the bottom, which means higher fuel costs, more pollution, and maybe less manoeuvrability.)

[EDITED to fix a typo (missing space).]

So we're talking about a package whose total value [EDIT: excluding other benefits like healthcare, free food, etc.] is on the order of $340k/year assuming the stock price is stable? And you had broadly comparable offers from other companies? Then I take back what I said: those are incredibly generous numbers in comparison with what I know of software developers' salaries in the UK. I don't know how that splits between (1) Silicon Valley being a really good place to be right now and (2) you personally being awesome, but congratulations in either case :-).

[EDIT: If whoever downvoted this is reading, and would like to tell me what's wrong with what I wrote, I'm listening. It still looks OK to me after rereading.]

Thanks. Those are pretty generous numbers in comparison with what I know of software developers' salaries in the UK, but that's not a huge surprise.

(When you wrote "1.3 that much", did you mean 0.3, or do you actually mean that you get paid more in equity than in cash?)