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Robin Hanson's avatar

I just added to this post.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Or maybe it wasn't some biological element, and was instead the philosophy implicitly held by a bunch of people who were all raised in an altruistic society.

The decision to help save others isn't necessarily a selfish one either. There are selfish justifications to help strangers in an emergency. All strangers are potentially valuable to you, due to the nature of humans and what they're capable of. Whether the action was selfish or selfless depends on how much risk you put yourself in, and how important the people were to you that you were saving.

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