29 Comments

can i contribute?

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I didn't mean to imply a discrete transition between young and old. Such changes do tend to be continuous.

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This is a nice complement to Vaillant's 'Aging Well' which draws a more continuous transition from young to older and very old life.

http://www.goodreads.com/bo...

(some key point here: http://www.setma.com/Your-L... )

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I expressed the scientific consensus.

The scare quotes were only because the very question of whether acts are "truly" selfless, and what that might mean, is what is at issue. My view is that, when we make the judgment that an act is "selfless", we are saying something meaningful and valid, even if the act can be causally traced, say, to evolutionarily derived kin preferences. At the level of whole persons, an act can be selfless even if mediated through "selfish genes" in the sense used by Dawkins. I see that your link talks about the minority group selection view and puts it in opposition to "just genes", but I think that's misleading; the majority view is *kin* selection rather than "group" selection, e.g., http://www.science4all.org/...

P.S. I wouldn't pin anything on an argument by Jon Haidt who, after closely following him for a long time after meeting him when he was a guest lecturer here, I came to realize is quite like Robin Hanson when it comes to intellectual honesty and aptitude. What little he had to offer as an academic was polluted by his getting quite political, braying about how he moved from being a liberal to being a centrist. And his Moral Foundations Theory, while cute and appealing, suffers from the glaring flaw that it doesn't include honesty as a moral foundation. I've pointed this out to him personally, without consequence. And I'm far from being a fan of Sam Harris, but in their exchange Haidt simply embarrassed himself: http://www.samharris.org/bl...

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Reams have been written on the subject, but that isn't to say there's anything close to a consensus. At the conclusion, you imply that acts are never truly selfless (only "selfless"). [My own opinion is that we can act selflessly, but only on the basis of habits that ultimately serve selfish purposes - which isn't too far from what I think you're saying. (See "The habit theory of morality, moral influence, and moral evolution" - http://juridicalcoherence.b... )]

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"the same psychology as the (one in a thousand?) folks of deep Christian fate, which is centered on love."

There are Christians, such as some of the people in the Catholic Worker's movement, whose deep faith is centered on love, but there are many whose deep faith *isn't*. efalken is not among, and cannot speak for the, former. Just look at how he impatiently, unlovingly lashed out at my comment -- that reflects a great amount of truth about a very common use of the word "love" in Christian dialog -- with his "You're angry and rude, so you must be right. Trenchant insight and analysis!" ... nothing in his cited Bible passage warrants that behavior. The very first thing that any of those genuinely deeply loving Christians would have done is humbly acknowledge the truth in the charge, apologized for their brethren, and then discuss how they try, but often fail, to rise higher.

If you want to know what kind of Christian efalken is, look at his comments on economics, e.g.,

"If an economist truly believes the marginal productivity of low wage workers is greater than wages...he should start a franchise or some company that primarily hires low wage workers, and get very rich. It's like someone who says 'stock markets are inefficient.' Lots of firms would love to know how. I guess tens of thousands of progressive economists are just too uninterested in money to be bothered, supposedly."

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Patronizing asshole. And it's "childishly", git. You know nothing of my life or productivity, nor do you care, contrary to your absurd pretenses.

I actually know some wonderful Christians; you're not one of them. Your "You're angry and rude, so you must be right. Trenchant insight and analysis!" was dishonest through and through, an ad hominem strawman that didn't touch on what I *actually said*. Perhaps I'm angry because I know of the vast amount of hurt done by Christians who claim to "love" while doing nothing of the sort.

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Logically, yes, but one's Bayesian posterior moves a lot in one direction. You are hurting your credibility and your life by acting so childish. You can be nice and still have strong opinions, and I bet you'll be happier and more productive.

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I think many people ignore status out of great faith, and that can be motivated by one's dog ('be the man your dog thinks you are'), work/craft (arete therein), religion, or family. For example, many Japanese have a strong purpose (ikigai) outside of peer pressure, and the motivations are rather prosaic: for the men it tends to be their company, women their family.

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"psychological evidence that man isn't necessarily inherently selfish."

Reams have been written by biologists, psychologists, and others about the subject of altruism. A proper understanding of the subject requires that one not ignore that human beings are biological machines and that not just their actions but also their thoughts are influenced by their chemical states. Emotions result from an interplay of hormones, a mechanism honed by evolution to improve the organism's fitness -- the ability to produce viable offspring. Because higher cognition plays such an important role in human behavior, emotions must fit into that scheme, which makes their influence far less deterministic than the simpler control mechanisms in other species. As a consequence, even though kin and group favorship statistically dominate other-directed behavior, there's a bell curve and numerous outliers. All of us will at times take actions that appear "selfless", but there are numerous factors at play such as ego and peer acceptance.

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Ad hominem strawman. My view, OTOH, is that just because you're a dishonest jackass doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong.

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What strikes me today is that the Christian right are the worst warmongers--allied on warfare with the (atheist) neocons. You don't see the slightest embrace of "turn the other cheek."

But it misunderstands the point to imply that Christianity as a mass movement embodies the same psychology as the (one in a thousand?) folks of deep Christian fate, which is centered on love. We're not here talking about a mass phenomenon, only psychological evidence that man isn't necessarily inherently selfish.

What I'd like to ask EFalken, if I can ask another question, is whether his conclusions pertain to folks of deep faith of non-Christian religions--particularly the Islamist faith. [I think the conclusion is probably correct about Buddhism, despite its not being a religion of love. Giving up "attachments" means (I think) giving up status seeking. Perhaps this state is obtained a little more often by Buddhists than by Christians--not that I'm by any means a Buddhist (or above status seeking).

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You're angry and rude, so you must be right. Trenchant insight and analysis!

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Sort of like how Christians "love the sinner" by being complete and utter assholes towards them and being grossly dishonest about their own holy books and dogma.

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I'm almost always talking about strong tendencies

In an em world, a weak tendency could become dominant in a fortnight, no?

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Why not?

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