Agree trust and cooperation is dual use, and I’m not sure how to think about this yet; perhaps the most important form of coordination is the one that prevents (directly or via substitution) harmful forms of coordination from arising.
One reason I wouldn’t call lack of altruism the root is that it’s not clear how to intervene on it, it’s like calling the laws of physics the root of all evil. I prefer to think about “how to reduce transaction costs to self-interested collaboration”. I’m also less sure that a society of people more altruistic motives will necessarily do better… the nice thing about self-interest is that your degree of care is proportional to your degree of knowledge about the situation. A society of extremely altruistic people who are constantly devoting resources to solve what they believe to be other people’s problems may actually be less effective at ensuring flourishing.
Neither entirely convinced nor entirely against the idea of defining ‘root cause’ essentially with respect to ‘where is intervention plausible’. Either way, to me that way of defining it would not have to exclude “altruism” as a candidate: (i) there could be scope to re-engineer ourselves to become more altruistic, and (ii) without doing that, gosh how infinitely difficult does it feel to improve the world truly systematically (as you rightly point out).
Agree trust and cooperation is dual use, and I’m not sure how to think about this yet; perhaps the most important form of coordination is the one that prevents (directly or via substitution) harmful forms of coordination from arising.
One reason I wouldn’t call lack of altruism the root is that it’s not clear how to intervene on it, it’s like calling the laws of physics the root of all evil. I prefer to think about “how to reduce transaction costs to self-interested collaboration”. I’m also less sure that a society of people more altruistic motives will necessarily do better… the nice thing about self-interest is that your degree of care is proportional to your degree of knowledge about the situation. A society of extremely altruistic people who are constantly devoting resources to solve what they believe to be other people’s problems may actually be less effective at ensuring flourishing.
Neither entirely convinced nor entirely against the idea of defining ‘root cause’ essentially with respect to ‘where is intervention plausible’. Either way, to me that way of defining it would not have to exclude “altruism” as a candidate: (i) there could be scope to re-engineer ourselves to become more altruistic, and (ii) without doing that, gosh how infinitely difficult does it feel to improve the world truly systematically (as you rightly point out).
That is strongly related to Unfit for the Future—The Need for Moral Enhancement (whose core story is spot on imho, even though I find quite some of the details in the book substandard)