This is a great question and I’m sorry I don’t have anything really probative for you. Puzzle pieces:
“If hell then good intentions” isn’t what you mean. You also don’t mean “if good intentions then hell”. So you presumably mean some surprisingly strong correlation. But still weaker than that of bad intentions. We’d have to haggle over what number counts as surprising. r = 0.1?
Nearly everyone has something they would call good intentions. But most people don’t exploit others on any scale worth mentioning. So the correlation can’t be too high.
Good things happen, sometimes, despite the odds. We have a good theory of how this can happen in a world without good intentions, so I don’t want to use this as strong evidence for good intentions. But good things still happen without competition and counter to incentive gradients.
In general I have a pretty high bar for illusionism, eliminativism, accusations of false consciousness, etc (something something phenomenal conservatism).
In this case: we clearly have more information than others about our own intentions. (This might not be a lot on an absolute scale though.)
I buy the ‘moral licencing’ idea, where people’s sense of moral duty is (very) finite but their cupidity is way less bounded. So you can think that good intentions are real but just run out faster. Shard seems like a baroque but empirically adequate version of this.
I think I buy the PR spokesperson account of our internal narrative / phenomenal consciousness. But the spokesperson isn’t limited to retconning naive egoism, since we know that other solutions are evolutionarily stable in the presence of precommitment and all the other dongles, and so it could be hiding those too.
I could look up the psychology literature but i’m not sure it would update either you or me.
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?
This is a great question and I’m sorry I don’t have anything really probative for you. Puzzle pieces:
“If hell then good intentions” isn’t what you mean. You also don’t mean “if good intentions then hell”. So you presumably mean some surprisingly strong correlation. But still weaker than that of bad intentions. We’d have to haggle over what number counts as surprising. r = 0.1?
Nearly everyone has something they would call good intentions. But most people don’t exploit others on any scale worth mentioning. So the correlation can’t be too high.
Good things happen, sometimes, despite the odds. We have a good theory of how this can happen in a world without good intentions, so I don’t want to use this as strong evidence for good intentions. But good things still happen without competition and counter to incentive gradients.
In general I have a pretty high bar for illusionism, eliminativism, accusations of false consciousness, etc (something something phenomenal conservatism).
In this case: we clearly have more information than others about our own intentions. (This might not be a lot on an absolute scale though.)
I buy the ‘moral licencing’ idea, where people’s sense of moral duty is (very) finite but their cupidity is way less bounded. So you can think that good intentions are real but just run out faster. Shard seems like a baroque but empirically adequate version of this.
I think I buy the PR spokesperson account of our internal narrative / phenomenal consciousness. But the spokesperson isn’t limited to retconning naive egoism, since we know that other solutions are evolutionarily stable in the presence of precommitment and all the other dongles, and so it could be hiding those too.
I could look up the psychology literature but i’m not sure it would update either you or me.
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?