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?
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?