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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

It could be that the world has long been divided into cynics and idealists, and your book makes standard cynic claims. Then it would be no contradiction for the cynics to say your claims are old news while the idealists decry your lack of evidence--the only bad intellectual behavior by either camp would be their failure to acknowledge the other.

(In reality your cynical claims are far from standard, though)

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Ronfar's avatar

The thing is, if act X has both a pro-social and a selfish explanation (you give to charity because you want to help people vs you give to charity because it makes you look good to others) then the answer can still be "both" without the selfish motive undermining the genuineness of the pro-social one. Selection, natural and otherwise, cares about selfish benefits, but there's a simple and effective, if often costly, solution the problem of how to appear to be a good person: actually be a good person! So selection creates good individuals because being good looks good, but individuals often act good because they really are good.

Which is how both criticisms can co-exist: people are good (and you haven't proven otherwise, how dare you accuse us of low motives) but they were made good by a process that rewards the appearance of goodness (duh, of course the ultimate source of goodness is the selfish rewards to goodness). Adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers!

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