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Comment by david_ar | Hacker News Reader

Not really, Nash equilibria aren't necessarily the best outcome for any individual (cf the prisoner's dilemma). Cooperation is usually better than every-man-for-himself for everyone involved, hence why social animals evolve altruistic traits. Of course, selfishness works at the expense of an altruistic majority, but that's why people don't like to associate with psychopaths

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That's in game theory. Not many people are ever offered a bona fide "prisoner's dilemma".

In most actual real life situations you can get far ahead by behaving as a sociopath.

>Of course, selfishness works at the expense of an altruistic majority, but that's why people don't like to associate with psychopaths

The thing is that as a sociopath you don't even have to show that you are that to people. You can still pretend to be altruistic (to your advantage) and still push your personal agenda whenever possible covertly.

>The thing is that as a sociopath you don't even have to show that you are that to people. You can still pretend to be altruistic (to your advantage) and still push your personal agenda whenever possible covertly.

People aren't stupid.

Prisoner's dilemma may be an exaggerated example, but it's a strawman argument to conclude that game theory isn't applicable to real life.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying selfishness doesn't exist, or that cheating the system doesn't work for some people. My point is that altruism is not "illogical", and it doesn't require "a faith in some God or man-given morality, ethics, or emotions like love, mercy etc" to make sense as the parent content suggested.

Selfishness exists outside of pathology. In fact, I don't know a single human who is not selfish on some level and I suspect such a creature doesn't exist. We do have a huge number of armchair psychiatrists making invalid long-distance diagnoses of people they don't like but that's not really the same thing.

I never claimed that nobody was at least a little selfish, I was simply arguing that it isn't illogical that most people aren't sociopaths.

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