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Ernie Garrett's avatar

Libertarians and others have known this for awhile, look up "Enlightened Self-Interest." It's not news to them, and in fact the free market was designed with the intent of creating profit that works through the same phenomenon.

The only "discovery" here is that you are ignorant and committed the hackneyed mistake of assuming you know more than your opposition. You don't.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Perhaps this is too simple, but it could be that there are a lot of situations where X is better for the group than for the individual, and, vice -versa, Y is better for the individual than the group. Since there's strength in numbers, it would behoove an individual to at least appear to be embodying X and therefore garner the favor of the group. If they can do that while surreptitiously reaping the rewards of Y, so much the better.

How many such pairs of X and Y can we (well, you) come up with, and how do they track against this hypothesis? This question isn't of a sufficiently high priority for me to consider seriously devoting cycles to it, but I'm definitely curious.

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