I really think egoism strains to fit the data. From a comment on a deleted post:
[in response to someone saying that self-sacrifice is necessarily about showing off and is thus selfish]:
How does this reduction [to selfishness] account for the many historical examples of people who defied local social incentives, with little hope of gain and sometimes even destruction?
(Off the top of my head: Ignaz Semmelweis, Irena Sendler, Sophie Scholl.)
We can always invent sufficiently strange posthoc preferences to “explain” any behaviour: but what do you gain in exchange for denying the seemingly simpler hypothesis “they had terminal values independent of their wellbeing”?
(Limiting this to atheists, since religious martyrs are explained well by incentives.)
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Pure selfishness can’t work, since if everyone is selfish, why would anyone believe anyone else’s PR? I guess there has to be some amount of real altruism mixed in, just that when push comes to shove, people who will make decisions truly aligned with altruism (e.g., try hard to find flaws in one’s supposedly altruistic plans, give up power after you’ve gained power for supposedly temporary purposes, forgo hidden bets that have positive selfish EV but negative altruistic EV) may be few and far between.
Ignaz Semmelweis
This is just a reasonable decision (from a selfish perspective) that went badly, right? I mean if you have empirical evidence that hand-washing greatly reduced mortality, it seems pretty reasonable that you might be able to convince the medical establishment of this fact, and as a result gain a great deal of status/influence (which could eventually be turned into power/money).
The other two examples seem like real altruism to me, at least at first glance.
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Question is, is there a better explanation than this?
I really think egoism strains to fit the data. From a comment on a deleted post:
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Pure selfishness can’t work, since if everyone is selfish, why would anyone believe anyone else’s PR? I guess there has to be some amount of real altruism mixed in, just that when push comes to shove, people who will make decisions truly aligned with altruism (e.g., try hard to find flaws in one’s supposedly altruistic plans, give up power after you’ve gained power for supposedly temporary purposes, forgo hidden bets that have positive selfish EV but negative altruistic EV) may be few and far between.
This is just a reasonable decision (from a selfish perspective) that went badly, right? I mean if you have empirical evidence that hand-washing greatly reduced mortality, it seems pretty reasonable that you might be able to convince the medical establishment of this fact, and as a result gain a great deal of status/influence (which could eventually be turned into power/money).
The other two examples seem like real altruism to me, at least at first glance.
Question is, is there a better explanation than this?