Your reluctance is both common and understandable. But it’s actually not that difficult to reconcile. Let’s talk about this from an egoist perspective. First of all, why should you care about other people? Simple: other people are a potentially valuable resource. Despite protestations otherwise, many smart people labor under the delusion that they are of singular genius and importance, and thus have a very difficult time truly grasping the idea that other people can be as valuable as they themselves are.
Your car, computer, bike, house, appliances, etc. are all resources that can accomplish certain ends much more efficiently than you can. So it doesn’t feel alien to put your own short term needs secondary to the long term maintenance of these resources. The reason it feels so alien to do the same thing with people is that you haven’t quite internalized the value of other people.
But what does that have to do with valuing other people’s success more than yours? Simple: if you’ve already made the right meta-cognitive choices, then the incremental value of spending “unallocated” time on yourself isn’t all that high. If you already devote an hour a day to reading, then opting to spend two hours at home reading on a weekend instead of going out doesn’t really provide much incremental benefit. If you are confident enough in your own life choices, then you don’t need to spend much active time on your own success because it’s already taking care of itself.
The stereotypical charismatic, socially adept extrovert tends to be much more confident and slightly less “intelligent” than your average LWer. Why is that? First of all, they’re not worried that the time they spend on others will affect themselves negatively. And because they aren’t as “intelligent”, they have a more acute awareness of just how valuable other people can be.
TL;DR: it only requires a fundamental change in your values if part of your fundamental value system says “other people are worthless”. And it only requires a delusion if you decide to take the straw-man interpretation of my post rather than the reasonable one.
It sounds like you’re talking about two different things. You’re misinterpreting “I don’t see why I shouldn’t care more about my friends than random people” to be “I don’t see why I should care about people at all”.
Neither did I. (Note the difference between “more than” and “equally with”.)
You said that he should care about “other people”, without you distinguishing between classes of people. This implies that you don’t think he cares about other people now. Phrased that way, that implies you think he doesn’t care about other people in general, not about non-friend other people. All of your arguments apply to people in general anyway.
But he never said that. He cares for some other people (his friends). He just doesn’t care for other people equally. EA is weird, and most people don’t share belief in it.
My use of the term “you” when I said “why should you care about other people” (and the rest of the post for that matter) was a stylistic use in the global sense, not personally directed at him.
The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn’t help at all, because it’s not what I understand by “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on.
I think we’re looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. Which is fine, it’s an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.
But to be clear, it’s a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I’d say: “Being confident enough in one’s own self-improvement processes that one expects more incremental value in dedicating unallocated time to other people’s success than one’s own.” If you have a disagreement with that, I’d much rather discuss that than semantics.
(The reason I chose one phrasing over the other is that, “I care more about your success than my own” sounds a lot more palatable to the person I’m helping out than, “I expect to see more value if I spend this time helping you than if I spend this time helping me.”)
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it’s a completely different attitude from the one you’re actually taking! You’re just viewing other people’s success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me.
I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that’s more atypical. (It’s also not clear how “spending time helping you” translates into felicitous interaction—most people I meet don’t need and couldn’t use my help; but I’m not asking you to explain because I don’t think I can use your approach anyway.)
There’s a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: “Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something” and “Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor”.
This attitude is universal; it’s not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn’t really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.
Your reluctance is both common and understandable. But it’s actually not that difficult to reconcile. Let’s talk about this from an egoist perspective. First of all, why should you care about other people? Simple: other people are a potentially valuable resource. Despite protestations otherwise, many smart people labor under the delusion that they are of singular genius and importance, and thus have a very difficult time truly grasping the idea that other people can be as valuable as they themselves are.
Your car, computer, bike, house, appliances, etc. are all resources that can accomplish certain ends much more efficiently than you can. So it doesn’t feel alien to put your own short term needs secondary to the long term maintenance of these resources. The reason it feels so alien to do the same thing with people is that you haven’t quite internalized the value of other people.
But what does that have to do with valuing other people’s success more than yours? Simple: if you’ve already made the right meta-cognitive choices, then the incremental value of spending “unallocated” time on yourself isn’t all that high. If you already devote an hour a day to reading, then opting to spend two hours at home reading on a weekend instead of going out doesn’t really provide much incremental benefit. If you are confident enough in your own life choices, then you don’t need to spend much active time on your own success because it’s already taking care of itself.
The stereotypical charismatic, socially adept extrovert tends to be much more confident and slightly less “intelligent” than your average LWer. Why is that? First of all, they’re not worried that the time they spend on others will affect themselves negatively. And because they aren’t as “intelligent”, they have a more acute awareness of just how valuable other people can be.
TL;DR: it only requires a fundamental change in your values if part of your fundamental value system says “other people are worthless”. And it only requires a delusion if you decide to take the straw-man interpretation of my post rather than the reasonable one.
It sounds like you’re talking about two different things. You’re misinterpreting “I don’t see why I shouldn’t care more about my friends than random people” to be “I don’t see why I should care about people at all”.
I never said anything about caring about random strangers more than you friends.
Neither did I. (Note the difference between “more than” and “equally with”.)
You said that he should care about “other people”, without you distinguishing between classes of people. This implies that you don’t think he cares about other people now. Phrased that way, that implies you think he doesn’t care about other people in general, not about non-friend other people. All of your arguments apply to people in general anyway.
But he never said that. He cares for some other people (his friends). He just doesn’t care for other people equally. EA is weird, and most people don’t share belief in it.
My use of the term “you” when I said “why should you care about other people” (and the rest of the post for that matter) was a stylistic use in the global sense, not personally directed at him.
The context seems to indicate otherwise.
The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn’t help at all, because it’s not what I understand by “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on.
I think we’re looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. Which is fine, it’s an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.
But to be clear, it’s a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I’d say: “Being confident enough in one’s own self-improvement processes that one expects more incremental value in dedicating unallocated time to other people’s success than one’s own.” If you have a disagreement with that, I’d much rather discuss that than semantics.
(The reason I chose one phrasing over the other is that, “I care more about your success than my own” sounds a lot more palatable to the person I’m helping out than, “I expect to see more value if I spend this time helping you than if I spend this time helping me.”)
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it’s a completely different attitude from the one you’re actually taking! You’re just viewing other people’s success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me.
I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that’s more atypical. (It’s also not clear how “spending time helping you” translates into felicitous interaction—most people I meet don’t need and couldn’t use my help; but I’m not asking you to explain because I don’t think I can use your approach anyway.)
There’s a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: “Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something” and “Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor”.
This attitude is universal; it’s not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn’t really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.