I think the distinction here isn’t intrinsically about altruism, it’s about the complexity/difficulty of the thing you’re trying to achieve. I do think altruism tends to have more complexity baked into it than selfishness of a corresponding scale, but it depends on the particular altruism/selfishness. Helping one person do an object level thing for a day is easier than going to the moon, even if you’re doing the latter for selfish reasons.
Obviously, what I’m talking about applies to goals of comparable grandeur. Big civilizational aims. “I want to help the local poor by working in a soup kitchen” is obviously easier than “I want to annex Ukraine to my empire”, even though the former is altruistic and the latter just selfish and cruel aggrandizement.
I think the distinction here isn’t intrinsically about altruism, it’s about the complexity/difficulty of the thing you’re trying to achieve. I do think altruism tends to have more complexity baked into it than selfishness of a corresponding scale, but it depends on the particular altruism/selfishness. Helping one person do an object level thing for a day is easier than going to the moon, even if you’re doing the latter for selfish reasons.
Obviously, what I’m talking about applies to goals of comparable grandeur. Big civilizational aims. “I want to help the local poor by working in a soup kitchen” is obviously easier than “I want to annex Ukraine to my empire”, even though the former is altruistic and the latter just selfish and cruel aggrandizement.