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Compassion will always be intermittent and fall prey to the factors you cited if not a foundational component of an individual's personal code. As an experimen

Compassion will always be intermittent and fall prey to the factors you cited if not a foundational component of an individual's personal code. As an experiment, in 2012 I spent a week on the road to hand-deliver a letter of need (not my own) to 25 of the largest philanthropists to liberal causes. Not one of them responded or helped personally, six of them had a staffer send a form letter of rejection. My conclusion is that compassion is too often valued only when self-serving. i.e. Dozens of uber-wealthy donate to charities that support the homeless and/or drug addicted, but view the "actual people" who collectively define the issue with suspicion and disdain.

drivebycomment 4y ago
Can you describe your experiment in more detail? Even with more detail, this seems like too anecdotal and not controlled to draw meaningful broad conclusions that you seem to be drawing, but regardless sounds very interesting.
hackerlight 4y ago
Compassion felt towards people who share your genes or people who will likely reciprocate is adaptive. Compassion felt towards animal prey and enemy tribes is maladaptive. We had to eat and be able to kill others in a skirmish. So it's no wonder people can switch it on and off in the presence or absence of contextual cues. It's in essence a thing that's designed to be self-serving.
- pfisherman 4y ago
  What about the cuteness of puppies, kittens, bear cubs, baby seals? Something about that triggers an emotional and compassionate response to their distress; and this seems to be hard wired into our brains. That would seem to be a complication for what you are suggesting.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Because pets have been engineered by us through artificial selection to have phenotypes that co-opt our adaptive tendency for compassion, in this case it's a tendency that was evolved to make sure we care for our own kids. It's analogous to when a parasite or virus or idea may co-opt certain adapted systems to survive and spread. Such viruses are usually bad for the host's fitness. The co-opted compassion we feel towards pets is possibly maladaptive because it may decrease the expected number of children, since pets can be substitutes.
    - pfisherman 4y ago
      But if it were maladaptive then it would have been selected against in people no?
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        You could ask the same question of any virus or idea or parasite that is currently co-opting evolved systems. One answer is that it's an evolutionary arms race. Evolution vs evolution has no clear winner. In this case, it's powerful artificial selection by dog breeders to create products that co-opt our compassion for our children. Another answer is that evolution needs more time to figure out how to beat it. Another answer is that it's not actually maladaptive because the assumption that pets reduce children isn't true. It may be adaptive because having a pet increases happiness. But even if this is true, it doesn't impact the validity of the thesis that compassion is a self-serving adaptation that gets switched off when needed.
        pfisherman 4y ago
        Viruses exist on a much smaller space time scale than human and they evolve and mutate much faster. In fact, we are in a constant arms race with pathogens (see development of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic resistance). As far as I know, bear cubs, wolf cubs, tiny lizards, etc have been cute for the entirety of recorded history, and probably much longer. So that does not seem like a very apt comparison. Also I think that you are conflating the survival mechanism of an organism - for example malaria latency - with a maladaptive immune response of the host - for example cytokine storm.

drivebycomment 4y ago

Can you describe your experiment in more detail? Even with more detail, this seems like too anecdotal and not controlled to draw meaningful broad conclusions that you seem to be drawing, but regardless sounds very interesting.

hackerlight 4y ago

Compassion felt towards people who share your genes or people who will likely reciprocate is adaptive. Compassion felt towards animal prey and enemy tribes is maladaptive. We had to eat and be able to kill others in a skirmish. So it's no wonder people can switch it on and off in the presence or absence of contextual cues. It's in essence a thing that's designed to be self-serving.

pfisherman 4y ago
What about the cuteness of puppies, kittens, bear cubs, baby seals? Something about that triggers an emotional and compassionate response to their distress; and this seems to be hard wired into our brains. That would seem to be a complication for what you are suggesting.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Because pets have been engineered by us through artificial selection to have phenotypes that co-opt our adaptive tendency for compassion, in this case it's a tendency that was evolved to make sure we care for our own kids. It's analogous to when a parasite or virus or idea may co-opt certain adapted systems to survive and spread. Such viruses are usually bad for the host's fitness. The co-opted compassion we feel towards pets is possibly maladaptive because it may decrease the expected number of children, since pets can be substitutes.
  - pfisherman 4y ago
    But if it were maladaptive then it would have been selected against in people no?
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      You could ask the same question of any virus or idea or parasite that is currently co-opting evolved systems. One answer is that it's an evolutionary arms race. Evolution vs evolution has no clear winner. In this case, it's powerful artificial selection by dog breeders to create products that co-opt our compassion for our children. Another answer is that evolution needs more time to figure out how to beat it. Another answer is that it's not actually maladaptive because the assumption that pets reduce children isn't true. It may be adaptive because having a pet increases happiness. But even if this is true, it doesn't impact the validity of the thesis that compassion is a self-serving adaptation that gets switched off when needed.
      - pfisherman 4y ago
        Viruses exist on a much smaller space time scale than human and they evolve and mutate much faster. In fact, we are in a constant arms race with pathogens (see development of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic resistance). As far as I know, bear cubs, wolf cubs, tiny lizards, etc have been cute for the entirety of recorded history, and probably much longer. So that does not seem like a very apt comparison. Also I think that you are conflating the survival mechanism of an organism - for example malaria latency - with a maladaptive immune response of the host - for example cytokine storm.