Interesting read, though I find it not easy to see exactly what your main message is. Two points strike me as potentially relevant regarding
what do I think the real root of all evil is? As you might have guessed from the above, I believe it’s our inability to understand and cooperate with each other at scale. There are different words for the thing we need more of: trust. social fabric. asabiyyah. attunement. love.
The first more relevant, the second a term I’d simply find naturally core in a discussion on the topic:
Even increased “trust. social fabric.” is not so clear to bring us forward. Let’s assume people remain similarly self-interested, similarly egoistic, but they are able to cooperate better in limited groups: easy to imagine circumstances in which dominant effects could include: (i) easier for hierarchies in tyrannic dictatorships to cooperate to oppress their population and/or (ii) easier for firms to cooperate to create & exploit market power, replacing some reasonably well-working markets by, say, crazily exploitative oligopolies and oligarchies.
Altruism: simply the sheer limitation to our degree of altruism*[1] with the wider population, might one call that one out as a single most dominant root of the tree of evil? Or, say, lack of altruism, combined with the necessary imperfection in self-interested positive collaboration given our world features at the time (i) our limited rationality and (ii) a hugely complex natural and economic environment? Increase our altruism, and most of today’s billions of bad incentives we’re exposed to become a bit less disastrous...
Along with self-serving bias, i.e. our brain’s sneaky way to reduce our actual behavioral/exhibited altruism to levels even below our (already limited) ‘heartfelt’ degree of altruistic interest, where we often think we try to act in other people’s interests while in reality pursuing our own interests.
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).
Interesting read, though I find it not easy to see exactly what your main message is. Two points strike me as potentially relevant regarding
The first more relevant, the second a term I’d simply find naturally core in a discussion on the topic:
Even increased “trust. social fabric.” is not so clear to bring us forward. Let’s assume people remain similarly self-interested, similarly egoistic, but they are able to cooperate better in limited groups: easy to imagine circumstances in which dominant effects could include: (i) easier for hierarchies in tyrannic dictatorships to cooperate to oppress their population and/or (ii) easier for firms to cooperate to create & exploit market power, replacing some reasonably well-working markets by, say, crazily exploitative oligopolies and oligarchies.
Altruism: simply the sheer limitation to our degree of altruism*[1] with the wider population, might one call that one out as a single most dominant root of the tree of evil? Or, say, lack of altruism, combined with the necessary imperfection in self-interested positive collaboration given our world features at the time (i) our limited rationality and (ii) a hugely complex natural and economic environment? Increase our altruism, and most of today’s billions of bad incentives we’re exposed to become a bit less disastrous...
Along with self-serving bias, i.e. our brain’s sneaky way to reduce our actual behavioral/exhibited altruism to levels even below our (already limited) ‘heartfelt’ degree of altruistic interest, where we often think we try to act in other people’s interests while in reality pursuing our own interests.
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)