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> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their live

> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth. On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish. Human behavior is much more complex.

saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
For sake of not derailing the discussion, I think the more appropriate reading would be "people act in what they believe to be self-interest", however flawed the notion of the benefit
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  Now you have weakened the generalization to the point it's meaningless. What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
  - vitally3643 5mo ago
    Belief is categorically not rooted in reality. That's why it's called belief and not fact. Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy. You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
    - eurekahalting 5mo ago
      > Humans are intrinsically irrational Yes > That is a plain and simple fact No You've not examined the cognitive resources required to properly locate "fact" when humans have other interests, like staying alive and providing for their families. The mechanism seems to encourage directional stances rather than comprehensive ones. * I wave some sort of unreal RFC 2119 wand at you *
    - lanstin 5mo ago
      Also, pure rationality is sort of an empty idea - without goals or preferences, it's not really possible to reason your way into deciding an action - just understanding the various likely consequencies of various courses of action. Without that hunger in your belly, your reason has nothing to recommend.
  - saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
    If you want an example, I guess the enthymeme would be: a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc. c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
    - marcosdumay 5mo ago
      The generalization only works if it's weak enough to be meaningless. Thus, the generalization is bad. Examples don't make it useful. "People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article. > I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
      - saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
        I didn't propose it, just clarified what I believe to be their point. I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
        skybrian 5mo ago
        [delayed]
- skybrian 5mo ago
  Smokers don’t seem to be under any illusions about whether it’s bad for them? When people have conflicting desires, I think what even counts as “self-interest” gets complicated. Often people are acting at cross-purposes to some of their desires.
  - saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
    I suppose the 'self-interest' of desiring a cigarette outweighs the 'self-interest' of preserving your health. Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc... Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
      aka discounting time value, or something like that. "the feeling i will get now by smoking this cigarette, though fleeting, is worth to me now than the chance of years more living, or a healthier late life, if i do not smoke it".
      - CooCooCaCha 5mo ago
        Yeah self-interest occurs across different time scales and consists of a mixture of logical and emotional factors. It’s also subjective and dependent on the persons values, beliefs, etc.
        michaelhoney 5mo ago
        "I want another drink now. Hangover is tomorrow-me's problem"
    - lanstin 5mo ago
      One certainly doesn't smoke imagining it's for the benefit of others - if anything it's the selfishness of now against the benefit of future me.
- cweld510 5mo ago
  Sure, but then the interesting question becomes how people decide whether or not an action is in their self-interest.
OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
Humans are terrible at doing what's best for them. They are pretty good at following local gradients, though. Smoking might kill you in 30 years, but right now it lets you fit in with the cool kids, or feels good once you're hooked. Not brushing your teeth might be terrible for them and your gums, eventually, but right now it saves you from having to do something. At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
- jpadkins 5mo ago
  One reasoning flaw I've seen in this type of discussion is the assumption that the person has the same value system as you / the experts. In your example, it is assumed that the subject values a very long life. Maybe they don't, maybe they value smoking way more than a long life. I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
- listenallyall 5mo ago
  Smoking is typically a bad example, IMO, because it really takes a lot to actually kill you^. Like 50 years, usually (even 30, in your example, is on the low side). Further, there really are no visible downsides among smokers in their first 10 years or so. Meanwhile lots of other bad habits - hard drugs, alcohol, over-eating, even just sloppiness or laziness - often have real, visible, negative effects pretty quickly. ^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers
quantified 5mo ago
I'd like to think humans perform more selfless than selfish acts, but their impact is not evenly balanced. Per act, it is far easier to harm than to help. In a day, if ten people do you a kindness like holding a door open for you and an eleventh spits in your face, you'll be thinking about and telling your acquaintances about the eleventh.
nostrademons 5mo ago
Not all humans act in their long-term self interest, but those that do will be disproportionately represented in positions that allow themselves to enrich their long-term self interest. The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves. "Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs1920/Cipolla_laws.pdf https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...
- duncangh 5mo ago
  Reminds me of the poem / song “All I wanna do” "All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Says the man next to me out of nowhere It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy And he's plain ugly to me And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant car wash The good people of the world Are washing their cars on their lunch break Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits
- watwut 5mo ago
  > The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves. These are regularly rich and at upper echelons of politics. Having actual ethical limitations is what limits enrichment and gain of power. And while most gamblers loose, some win big and then gain power.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
brightball 5mo ago
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially. The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do, because of course what he wants is best for everyone. He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all. Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things and in all the same ways as he himself does. So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill. If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
  - throw0101c 5mo ago
    > It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do […] There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves. For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care; instead many people prevent themselves from getting better health care because if they did that would mean other people (and specifically the 'wrong kind' of other people) would also get it: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over. They are actively harming themselves out of spite.
bigstrat2003 5mo ago
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives To the extent this is true, that is only because they believe those candidates will make their lives better. People often declare how their outgroup "votes against their own interests", and use it as some kind of indictment of those people's intelligence. But that is nothing more than a failure to understand people. Essentially nobody is out there voting for someone whom they believe will make their lives worse m
- hn_acc1 5mo ago
  There are people voting to make their lives worse, as long as "other's lives" will be made even more worse as a result.
shimman 5mo ago
Spoken like someone who has done zero canvassing or organizing of any kind. You ask two voters on both sides of the spectrum and they'll make the same argument you are. Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
  > Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said > People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...] Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...". But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    And most of those boil down to “voting for X decreases the things I care about increases the things I don’t care about; therefore those who care about those things are voting insane.” It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
      Voting "insane" is very different from voting "selfish". Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc). But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all. It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).
asdff 5mo ago
People are driven by dopamine. Promotions lead to dopamine. So does gambling. Cigarettes. Sex with hookers. Locking down your series A. Hearing the engine go vrooom. Voting for the guy that loudly says "fuck you" to the other guy. All this is perfectly congruent.
antman 5mo ago
Most of these are either things they believe wont affect them or will affect them in the future. This is not a common behavior for things that will affect them immediately amd I have yet to see someone pass on a promotion because they thought someone else was better
xphos 5mo ago
I think you complexity can be capture by defining what people think is best for them. Gamblers often consider there gambling equal to investing. Smoking makes people feel good in the short term, exercise is hard and painful in the short term. There certainly people who are selfless but in the distribution of personalities selfless feels more rare. And their is always a question to what extent. I think what Hannah Arendt really is getting at is that is possible to build a system that reinforces small compromises for reasonable benefit that leads the system to meltdown when everyone starts making small compromises

saltwatercowboy 5mo ago

For sake of not derailing the discussion, I think the more appropriate reading would be "people act in what they believe to be self-interest", however flawed the notion of the benefit

marcosdumay 5mo ago
Now you have weakened the generalization to the point it's meaningless. What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
- vitally3643 5mo ago
  Belief is categorically not rooted in reality. That's why it's called belief and not fact. Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy. You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
  - eurekahalting 5mo ago
    > Humans are intrinsically irrational Yes > That is a plain and simple fact No You've not examined the cognitive resources required to properly locate "fact" when humans have other interests, like staying alive and providing for their families. The mechanism seems to encourage directional stances rather than comprehensive ones. * I wave some sort of unreal RFC 2119 wand at you *
  - lanstin 5mo ago
    Also, pure rationality is sort of an empty idea - without goals or preferences, it's not really possible to reason your way into deciding an action - just understanding the various likely consequencies of various courses of action. Without that hunger in your belly, your reason has nothing to recommend.
- saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
  If you want an example, I guess the enthymeme would be: a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc. c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    The generalization only works if it's weak enough to be meaningless. Thus, the generalization is bad. Examples don't make it useful. "People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article. > I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
    - saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
      I didn't propose it, just clarified what I believe to be their point. I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
      - skybrian 5mo ago
        [delayed]
skybrian 5mo ago
Smokers don’t seem to be under any illusions about whether it’s bad for them? When people have conflicting desires, I think what even counts as “self-interest” gets complicated. Often people are acting at cross-purposes to some of their desires.
- saltwatercowboy 5mo ago
  I suppose the 'self-interest' of desiring a cigarette outweighs the 'self-interest' of preserving your health. Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc... Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
    aka discounting time value, or something like that. "the feeling i will get now by smoking this cigarette, though fleeting, is worth to me now than the chance of years more living, or a healthier late life, if i do not smoke it".
    - CooCooCaCha 5mo ago
      Yeah self-interest occurs across different time scales and consists of a mixture of logical and emotional factors. It’s also subjective and dependent on the persons values, beliefs, etc.
      - michaelhoney 5mo ago
        "I want another drink now. Hangover is tomorrow-me's problem"
  - lanstin 5mo ago
    One certainly doesn't smoke imagining it's for the benefit of others - if anything it's the selfishness of now against the benefit of future me.
cweld510 5mo ago
Sure, but then the interesting question becomes how people decide whether or not an action is in their self-interest.

OkayPhysicist 5mo ago

Humans are terrible at doing what's best for them. They are pretty good at following local gradients, though. Smoking might kill you in 30 years, but right now it lets you fit in with the cool kids, or feels good once you're hooked. Not brushing your teeth might be terrible for them and your gums, eventually, but right now it saves you from having to do something. At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.

jpadkins 5mo ago
One reasoning flaw I've seen in this type of discussion is the assumption that the person has the same value system as you / the experts. In your example, it is assumed that the subject values a very long life. Maybe they don't, maybe they value smoking way more than a long life. I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
listenallyall 5mo ago
Smoking is typically a bad example, IMO, because it really takes a lot to actually kill you^. Like 50 years, usually (even 30, in your example, is on the low side). Further, there really are no visible downsides among smokers in their first 10 years or so. Meanwhile lots of other bad habits - hard drugs, alcohol, over-eating, even just sloppiness or laziness - often have real, visible, negative effects pretty quickly. ^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers

quantified 5mo ago

I'd like to think humans perform more selfless than selfish acts, but their impact is not evenly balanced. Per act, it is far easier to harm than to help. In a day, if ten people do you a kindness like holding a door open for you and an eleventh spits in your face, you'll be thinking about and telling your acquaintances about the eleventh.

nostrademons 5mo ago

Not all humans act in their long-term self interest, but those that do will be disproportionately represented in positions that allow themselves to enrich their long-term self interest. The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves. "Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs1920/Cipolla_laws.pdf https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...

duncangh 5mo ago
Reminds me of the poem / song “All I wanna do” "All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Says the man next to me out of nowhere It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy And he's plain ugly to me And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant car wash The good people of the world Are washing their cars on their lunch break Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits
watwut 5mo ago
> The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves. These are regularly rich and at upper echelons of politics. Having actual ethical limitations is what limits enrichment and gain of power. And while most gamblers loose, some win big and then gain power.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

brightball 5mo ago

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially. The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.

NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do, because of course what he wants is best for everyone. He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all. Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things and in all the same ways as he himself does. So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill. If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
- throw0101c 5mo ago
  > It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do […] There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves. For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care; instead many people prevent themselves from getting better health care because if they did that would mean other people (and specifically the 'wrong kind' of other people) would also get it: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over. They are actively harming themselves out of spite.

bigstrat2003 5mo ago

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives To the extent this is true, that is only because they believe those candidates will make their lives better. People often declare how their outgroup "votes against their own interests", and use it as some kind of indictment of those people's intelligence. But that is nothing more than a failure to understand people. Essentially nobody is out there voting for someone whom they believe will make their lives worse m

hn_acc1 5mo ago
There are people voting to make their lives worse, as long as "other's lives" will be made even more worse as a result.

shimman 5mo ago

Spoken like someone who has done zero canvassing or organizing of any kind. You ask two voters on both sides of the spectrum and they'll make the same argument you are. Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.

PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
> Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said > People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...] Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...". But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".
- bombcar 5mo ago
  And most of those boil down to “voting for X decreases the things I care about increases the things I don’t care about; therefore those who care about those things are voting insane.” It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
    Voting "insane" is very different from voting "selfish". Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc). But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all. It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).

asdff 5mo ago

People are driven by dopamine. Promotions lead to dopamine. So does gambling. Cigarettes. Sex with hookers. Locking down your series A. Hearing the engine go vrooom. Voting for the guy that loudly says "fuck you" to the other guy. All this is perfectly congruent.

antman 5mo ago

Most of these are either things they believe wont affect them or will affect them in the future. This is not a common behavior for things that will affect them immediately amd I have yet to see someone pass on a promotion because they thought someone else was better

xphos 5mo ago

I think you complexity can be capture by defining what people think is best for them. Gamblers often consider there gambling equal to investing. Smoking makes people feel good in the short term, exercise is hard and painful in the short term. There certainly people who are selfless but in the distribution of personalities selfless feels more rare. And their is always a question to what extent. I think what Hannah Arendt really is getting at is that is possible to build a system that reinforces small compromises for reasonable benefit that leads the system to meltdown when everyone starts making small compromises